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Cable and Satellite Television Distribution Rights, Net
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12 Months Ended | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Dec. 31, 2014
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| Cable and Satellite Television Distribution Rights [Abstract] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cable and Satellite Television Distribution Rights, Net |
Cable and Satellite Television Distribution Rights, Net
Cable and satellite television distribution rights consisted of the following:
The Company enters into affiliation agreements with cable and satellite television providers for carriage of the Company's shopping service, as well as for certain channel placement. If these cable and satellite affiliates were to add additional subscribers to the agreement through acquisition, the Company may be required to make additional payments.
The Company's ability to continue to sell products to its customers is dependent on its ability to maintain and renew these affiliation agreements. In some cases, renewals are not agreed upon prior to the expiration of a given agreement while the programming continues to be carried by the relevant distributor without an effective agreement in place. The Company does not have distribution agreements with some of the cable operators that carry its programming.
Cable and satellite television distribution rights are amortized using the straight-line method over the lives of the individual agreements. The remaining weighted average lives of the cable and satellite television distribution rights was approximately 2.9 years at December 31, 2014. Amortization expense for cable and satellite television distribution rights was $185 million, $177 million and $163 million for the years ended December 31, 2014, 2013 and 2012, respectively.
As of December 31, 2014, related amortization expense for each of the next five years ended December 31 was as follows (in millions):
The decrease in future amortization expense in 2018 is primarily due to the end of affiliation agreement terms for contracts in place at the time of the Liberty acquisition of QVC in 2003.
In return for carrying our signals, each programming distributor in the U.S. receives an allocated portion, based upon market share, of up to 5% of the net sales of merchandise sold via the television programs and from certain Internet sales to customers located in the programming distributors' service areas. In Germany, Japan, the U.K. and Italy, programming distributors predominately receive an agreed-upon annual fee, a monthly fee per subscriber regardless of the net sales, a variable percentage of net sales or some combination of the above arrangements. The Company recorded expense related to these commissions of $299 million, $298 million and $296 million for the years ended December 31, 2014, 2013 and 2012, respectively, which is included as part of operating expenses in the consolidated statements of operations.
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