Time Warner + WDRB/WMYO = A Happy Media World

As of midnight on Friday, June 1, 2012 Time Warner cable, who recently purchased Insight cable, was no longer carrying the Louisville Fox and MyNetwork TV affiliates, WDRB and WMYO.
From the consumers perspective, what the H?  All big companies are greedy and want more money.  Don’t they know the economy still stinks and thousands of people are without jobs?  I depend on this station for my news and entertainment.  Thanks a lot, Time Warner! I’ve been waiting for a reason to cancel my service and try out U-Verse and this just might be it.
From the network affiliates’ perspective, give us a break, we aren’t keeping any of the additional money we’re asking for.  People think that we’re greedy but what they don’t understand it that we have to pay Fox to air their programming.  Believe us, nobody wants to get us back on the air more quickly than we do.
From Time Warner’s perspective, individual stations can’t force us to pay whatever amount they desire.  From a contractual standpoint, we don’t have to air your signal.  We can talk about this and come to a resolution, or not, it’s up to you.
And finally from the advertisers’ prospective, I placed a schedule that I expected the full market to see and now only a fraction of the audience is being delivered.  Do I cancel my schedule? Can I even do that?  Is there any inventory in the market still available at this short of a notice?
Thankfully, a deal was signed on Wednesday, June 6 that allowed Time Warner to begin airing both WDRB and WMYO again late in the evening. I know this was a difficult position for the sales staff at WDRB and put a lot of advertisers in an uncomfortable situation.  I think the management team at WDRB took a pro-active and grass roots approach to provide consumers with their side of the story, utilizing their own airtime, website and even taking a full page ad in the Courier Journal.  We, like many other advertisers, had no choice but to redirect our advertising dollars that were scheduled to run on these stations over this time period.  I’m hopeful that as the other local affiliates move through their own upcoming cable negotiation process, that this will go down in history as an isolated incident.