Anime fan sites have been abuzz since last week with the news that Anime Network's Free on Demand service was suddenly unavailable in markets served by Adelphia and RCN.  The outage led to speculation that the cable providers had dropped the Anime Network service.  ADV, in a statement due to be released on Thursday, said that the service interruption was due to a temporary problem, and that service to those markets should resume by December 8th. 

 

According to the explanation provided by ADV, the problem occurred at a transport service that handles the delivery of encoded content from ADV to the cable providers in blocks.  Delivery to the cable providers generally occurs 10 days before the content is available on demand; ADV provides its content to the transport service 30 days in advance, based on a Free on Demand schedule that's set 45 days in advance.  According to the statement, the disruption of service was caused by 'unanticipated scheduling issues, which took time to detect and will take time to fix.'  

 

'We regret the disruption, and hope that Adelphia and RCN customers will bear with us as normal program scheduling is restored,' the statement says.