It's ridiculous to debate the lawsuit here - even using court documents - lawyers LIE. The only ones in a court case who are required to tell the truth are witnesses under oath.
That's why one has to read through the various letters, depositions, emails and spreadsheets filed with the court to determine whose verision of the truth is less dishonest and misleading than the other.
The bottom line is VOOM will win if they can prove they met the spend limit; EchoStar will win if they did not. Judge Lowe's jury instruction may serve to lower the bar for VOOM and lead to big buck$ in punitive damages should VOOM prevail in this case. As you'll recall, the spoliation of evidence instruction will be given to the jury because the court found (as later affirmed by the appellate court) Dish had detroyed evidence that was relevant to VOOM's claims; "We agree with the motion court that an adverse instruction was warranted because Echostar's spoliation of electronic evidence was the result of gross negligence at the very least, and now affirm."
Regardless, I am sure Dish would still be raising a hullabaloo over AMC Networks' fee increase since they do it with all the programmers; seriously, this uproar is nothing new. However, I feel their case with the now defunct VOOM is the reason Dish announced terminating all the AMC Networks channels at the end of June. Personally, I think this dispute will hurt both parties should they not reach a new agreement. While there is certainly "bad blood" between the two parties...VOOM feels Dish illegally terminated the affiliation agreement because they were not happy with the contract they signed, and Dish feels that VOOM was an unwilling partner who took advantage of them by not mass-marketing the VOOM HD channels nor offering them better terms when they saw Dish was backed into a corner...however, they will need to treat these as two issues as separate matters (i.e., compartmentalize) in order to reach a deal.
I think we'll see a deal reached during June...however, there was a lot of blood shed between the Hatfields & McCoys before they resolved their differences...
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