Spike TV tries again: Two months later than its operators had hoped, The National Network (TNN) will be renamed Spike TV. Viacom announced Tuesday it will make the change Aug. 11. It had been scheduled for June 16, but was put off when filmmaker Spike Lee sued to stop it. Lee and Viacom settled the lawsuit earlier this month. Viacom is positioning Spike as a TV channel for young men.
Eh. I was wondering when they'd get around to it, once they settled. (I still think that BCBTBBtv was a better way to go, though.)
One does begin to wonder ... Spike Lee and Viacom are still in bed with each other on various projects, despite the lawsuit. There seems never to have been any chance that those projects were going to be dropped. The suit was settled awfully quickly, especially considering that the judge said that there were clearly grounds to proceed. One might be excused for wondering ... was it perhaps somehow arranged that this suit would be brought and then dropped, thereby getting SpikeTV all sorts of publicity that it couldn't otherwise get? After all, there was all sorts of sampling of its Thursday night animation lineup that wouldn't have happened otherwise, simply because people who didn't catch the ads in the right places wouldn't have known it was there.
In any event, merely editorial speculation and opinion. Certainly not any sort of accusation. After all, both Spike Lee and Viacom would be fools to take that route. If they were found out, the consequences would be disastrous for both.
Posted by iain at July 22, 2003 11:34 PMComments
Post a comment
previously: « spike spikes spike |
Main
| next: attack of the fab 5 »