WNYS and WSYT off Time Warner Cable Jan 1

[lorank316]

On Auburn local channel 4 and 11 it says Due to the way ongoing negociations are going Time Warner cable may be forced to drop coverage of WNYS channel 7 and WSYT channel 8 as of January 1, 2007. Is this just Auburn or all of the Syracuse market and is this because of the whole Sinclair wanting TW to pay for HD signals? What would replace these stations?

 

[dampier]

On Auburn local channel 4 and 11 it says Due to the way ongoing negociations are going Time Warner cable may be forced to drop coverage of WNYS channel 7 and WSYT channel 8 as of January 1, 2007. Is this just Auburn or all of the Syracuse market and is this because of the whole Sinclair wanting TW to pay for HD signals? What would replace these stations?

A chyron would replace the stations telling you as a viewer to call the station and complain. This is nothing we haven't seen before. It's a negotiating ploy, and these are almost always resolved within hours or days of the final deadline, so I wouldn't worry about it yet. At the very worst, the chyron replacing the stations on cable will cause a marathon session getting the stations back on within days of it appearing. Most of the time these guys meet in the middle, usually with a cable system agreeing to carry sub-channels or some other cable network (although this being Sinclair, it would probably be the former) in analog and digital, or the cable system agreeing to a massive ad buy on the stations. If the station is a CW affiliate, all bets are off because they are less important.

TW is loathe to pay cash for retransmission agreements. They'll agree to almost anything else.