Time Warner Cable and CBS Inc. have finally resolved their month-long retransmission battle that will bring back CBS broadcast and Showtime back to cable subscribers in New York City, Los Angeles and the Dallas/Ft. Worth area.
This means that subscribers in these markets will not be cut-off from regular season NFL football or the rest of the final season of the Showtime hit “Breaking Bad.”
The dispute was over whether/how much TWC (which is no-longer owned by media giant Time-Warner) would pay to CBS to carry the broadcast network on its cable systems. While we don’t know the terms of the final contract, CBS had been asking TWC to pay $2 per month per subscriber. According to Media Post, TWC had been paying somewhere in the range of 50 cents per subscriber previously. For comparison, ESPN gets $5 per month per subscriber.
During the dispute, TWC subscribers who wanted to watch CBS had to get HD antennas to bring in the broadcast network, and Radio Shack stores in affected cities were reportedly up sharply.
If you’d like an in-depth look at the issues surrounding broadcast retransmission, turn to this blog post by the New Yorker’s Ken Auletta (who else?).