Disney and Cablevision Agree to Truce

Last Updated on Monday, 08 March 2010 10:21 Monday, 08 March 2010 10:21

WABC In the most recent round of carriage fee feud's, ABC owner Disney and cable company Cablevision have come to a temporary agreement allowing carriage of ABC's WABC to resume on the Cablevision system in New York and New Jersey. However, this dispute is the latest in a recent spate of high profile threats to blackout television channels on cable networks, and it is a problem that threatens to spread to cities across the United States.

The New York Times' Brian Stelter takes a closer look at this case, and others, and what might happen next in the retransmission wars;

Most retransmission disputes come down to the wire, but few end with an actual blackout of a channel. Yet that is what happened for nearly 21 hours on Sunday, a demonstration of the hard-nosed tactics by both media companies.

Cable providers have long paid substantial fees to carry cable-only channels like ESPN and TNT, but have paid nothing to carry traditional broadcast channels — a situation that the cash-starved broadcast networks have wanted to change. The decline of the TV advertising market has “accelerated that push,” Derek Baine, a cable industry analyst for SNL Kagan, said Sunday.

Disney first blocked its signal from Cablevision’s system just after midnight Sunday morning, prompting some cable customers to buy over-the-air TV tuners, modern day versions of rabbit ears, to ensure that they could watch the Academy Awards without interruption. Others heeded ABC’s advice to sign up for one of Cablevision’s competitors.

In the long run, even switching to another television service may not have solved the problem. Though this fight pits Disney and Cablevision, the battle is bigger than those two companies, and promises to spread across the country to other cable providers and stations. “We’re going to see more and more of these disputes,” Mr. Baine said.

ABC started by asking for up to $1 per subscriber a month for its local signal, though people briefed on the matter say that was a negotiating maneuver and the target price is closer to 60 cents a subscriber. Cablevision is said to have offered an unknown fraction of that. At an impasse, ABC threatened to pull the plug.

It was a high-stakes move for Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive: he was potentially taking his No. 1 affiliate in the country out of more than three million homes on ABC’s highest-rated day of the year. (Only championship football is more popular than the Academy Awards among American TV viewers.)