Sinclair/Time Warner Flap

There's a BIG elephant in the room, and as of right now - it's not looking good for Cincinnati or Dayton viewers of Time Warner Cable.

Here's what we know: Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which owns and/or operates WSTR 64/Cincinnati, WRGT 45/Dayton, WKEF 22/Dayton, WSYX 6/Columbus and WTTE 28/Columbus, is in negotiations with Time Warner Cable for their retransmission agreements, along with 28 other station agreements. These negotiations come up every so often, about roughly every 5-6 years.

As usual, the fight is about money, and how much Time Warner has to pay Sinclair. As of 3 days ago, Sinclair was, shall we say, less than optimistic. (The previous link is from MediaWeek.com.) Sinclair says they'll yank programming off of Time Warner systems in the affected areas if there's no agreement on December 31.

Hmmmm...doesn't this sound like something that's happened before? If yours truly recalls, FOX was threatening the same thing last year at this time, impacting several cable stations, against Time Warner.

It's somewhat ironic - now, several FOX stations that weren't even involved in last year's issues between News Corp and Time Warner, though they have a News Corp network affiliation, are now in danger of being yanked off air.

We're following this one CLOSELY. By the way, as of this writing, WRGT and WKEF's websites are flat inaccessible - or at least very slow. Even WSTR isn't working. We've got no idea why - but stay tuned, we're going to see if it's working later today...and then see if it has anything to do with the negotiations...