ABC 7 and ABC 6 off the AIR On Cablevision Sets; Other local channels blacked out for a few minutes

New Updates

Did ABC fall under the pressure? It appears ABC has, “sent Cablevision a new proposal, and are awaiting their response. If Cablevision is serious about doing right by their customers and returning ABC7 and its programming to them, then they need to act now. The ball is in their court” ~ Rebecca Campbell President and GM of WABC TV

Does this mean ABC has lowered the amount of their proposed offer?

Well it appears so! ABC is back on Cablevision TV sets!

A statement from Cablevision was released. Cablevision, “today said it would agree to government calls for binding arbitration with ABC Disney in order to immediately return ABC to Cablevision customers.”

So a private third party entity will weigh the dispute between the two companies so they may come to a resolution. Unfortunately for us, we won’t be able to see what the actual amount of the retransmission fee ABC is proposing.

[via Cablevision][Saveabc7]

ABC 7 has left Cablevision subscribers

ABC has pulled the plug on ABC7. Cablevision customers no longer have access to ABC. At exactly 12:01AM EST, ABC placed a final message to Cablevision stating:

Cablevison has betrayed you again. First HGTV and Food Network, now you’ve lost ABC7. Enough is Enough! Go to saveabc7.com to switch your service now.

Wow, is it me or are both of these companies getting overly dramatic?

The heat of this dispute is in regards to a “retransmission fee”. This fee was recently brought up for negotiations as to how much Cablevision should pay to carry local ABC channels which is broadcast for free over the air.

Any broadcast company can negotiate what a cable company (FIOS included) should pay for access to their channels. The negotiation deals did not fall through for Cablevision and ABC.

ABC believes Cablevision did not propose a reasonable amount to cover the costs of programming. Cablevision believes ABC is asking for too much and wanted a fair deal for customers so that their cable bill would not rise so steeply.

I highly suggest reading more about what local channels like ABC charge cable and satellite providers.

Who do you side with?

Thanks to third party sites informing the public we now have two generally reasonable arguments;

If you side with ABC:

• You believe Cablevision should pay ABC’s proposed amount since Cablevision is already charging customers  to view local channels.

If you side with Cablevision:

• You believe ABC should not charge Cablevision for access since ABC is available over the air for free.
• ABC should pay Cablevision instead since it allows those too far away from ABC’s over the air signal to watch their shows.

In the former case, your bill goes up, however according to ABC, Cablevision should use the money they “pocket” for basic broadcasting tier to cover the cost. This would instead continue to allow our cable bills to remain the same.

Basically you can think of it as; if one group performed a play for free and someone else recorded and charged money to view it on DVD, wouldn’t the acting group deserve a cut of the profit? Though if you were cynical you could still fault those who put on the play for free in the first place.

Maybe doing away with local broadcasters requesting a retransmission fee and removing basic broadcasting tier fees for cable customers might just do away with this annoyance. That is of course too idealistic for this world. 

There is also an argument that the Basic broadcasting fee covers Cablevision’s equipment and service costs, however the general public would look at such a label and conclude that we would be paying for local and basic cable channels. In fact before researching, I believed cable customers and cable networks weren’t paying at all for local channels and neither were local channels requesting any forms of payment.

Other Local Channels Blacked Out

There appears to have been a glitch during the ABC outage. Other local channels including CBS 2, NBC 4,  FOX 5, My9, and PIX11 were blacked out for a few minutes. NJN a PBS station was frozen with a static image of three individuals sitting down with their eyes closed as audio kept playing in the background. I guess the PBS show was so boring that they fell asleep.

Fortunately the channels returned, as well as a new cable alert message for both ABC channels as well as channel 1999.