Oh no, they're doing it again.

A TV carrier and a popular TV content provider are not seeing eye to eye when it comes to reimbursement rates and viewers might be left with a blank screen. This time it's the AT&T U-verse broadband service versus Rainbow Media, which operates AMC, WE tv and IFC.

In the balance is the season debut of the AMC hit 'Mad Men,' which airs July 25.

The two sides have been negotiating unsuccessfully for the past six months, according to a report on Deadline Hollywood. Their previous agreement expired July 1 and a new deadline is midnight, July 14.

You don't often see a company using the theme song to another commercial for the theme song in their commercial, but that's what Verizon is doing in this spot. It's the jingle from old Big Red gum commercials. I think it was used in the '80s and maybe into the '90s, but it's funny to see it used for a completely different product.

After the jump, the original (yes, that's Peter Billingsley). It's funny how they didn't just grab the theme song they reproduced scenes from the original spot (though I bet a lot of people wouldn't even had remembered those scenes in the old ad without seeing it again).

Remember the early 90s commercials from AT&T that asked various technology questions and then ended with Tom Selleck saying "You Will?" Someone on YouTube has put a montage of the ads and it's interesting that so many of these tech predictions/plans have actually come true.

I don't know how many people open their doors with their voice, but most of the other tech stuff has come true in one way or another.

[via David Pogue]

Get ready for scores of underpants puns as AT&T Uverse adds the Shorts International channel to their lineup. They're calling their version ShortsHD and describing it as " a unique entertainment channel dedicated to short movies."

The world's first channel dedicated exclusively to shorts includes mini-films from around the world divided into different genre and theme collections. One of its more prominent shows, "Stars in Shorts" (See what I mean?), features major movie faces like Keira Knightley and Michael Cera appearing in original short-form productions.

There are actually some interesting titles in this ultimate short attention span line-up, including the Star Trek themed "Orion Slave Girls Must Die!" and the Disney examination, "Dream on Silly Dreamer."

Ever gotten a bill in the mail so ridiculously high that it makes you wish you could rally together a ragtag army of disgruntled miscreants and take down the corporation that charged you "Viking style"?

Sure, we all have. So why don't you? Gathering an army takes time and most of us don't have many friends willing to take an arrow to the chest for us, much less a check. Arrows, while cheaper than bullets, can add up and aren't tax deductible. And I'm pretty sure that any looting and/or pillaging is a federal crime.

Mythbuster Adam Savage, however, has both the manpower and weaponry to pull just such a caper and he didn't have to bury one friend in a fiery ship at sea to do it.

If the reports coming from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette are true, maybe the news that we had yesterday about American Idol voting irregularities is meatier than we thought. One fan that says she voted for Kris Allen over 10,000 times.

It's also interesting that Idol rules state that power texting, the kind of texting that AT&T reps showed Kris Allen fans how to do, is against the rules. Isn't there some sort of built-in safety net for the voting? How can one fan vote over 10,000 times for one person? Shouldn't it be one person, one vote? Or one household, one vote? Or maybe one phone number, one vote? I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with the results. I have no idea. But it does seem that a better system could be in place.

So Kris Allen beat Adam Lambert by a ton of votes last week. You knew there would be a controversy, right? This one is based around AT&T. Seems they might have pushed the results toward Allen by having their reps at parties organized by fans of Allen and teaching them how to "power text," which apparently means sending 10 or more text messages at once. The New York Times has all the details.