So what if we did lose WTEN ABC-10 from Time Warner Cable? (UPDATE)

Last night, I watched the Oscars telecast with my friend Marty – it was going to be a Daytona 500/Oscars doubleheader before Mother Nature decided to turn it into a single feature – we would guess who would win each award as it came up.  Marty was ahead 4-3 in Oscar picks – every time she picked Hugo to win an award, it did, but I did correctly pick The Artist as the deserving winner for Best Picture.  Come on, it really was the Best Picture of the Year.  No argument.

Still, throughout the telecast, I was distracted by something that I never thought I would see during such a prestigious telecast.

During the broadcast, I watched as WTEN, our local ABC affiliate, ran a digital “crawl” along the bottom of the television screen, noting that their contract with Time Warner Cable to broadcast WTEN’s signal would expire on February 29, 2012 – this coming Wednesday.  If terms between Time Warner Cable and WTEN were not reached by that time, WTEN would disappear from Time Warner Cable’s selectable channel options.  Oh, and if we want to keep WTEN on our cable systems, we needed to visit WTEN’s website and voice our concerns.

In other words, if you don’t want to miss the new season of Dancing With the Stars or find out whose heart got broken on The Bachelor, you need to call Time Warner Cable and cry, “I want my 10-TV” or something like that.

Or…

This is getting old fast.  Why do these television stations and networks have to treat this like some sort of “Time Warner is being a jerk, they’re going to take away your favorite shows, you gotta write them and tell them to do what it takes to keep your TV programs on the air!”  And then Time Warner will be like, “You want your cable bill to go up?  These stations and networks are demanding more money for local carriage, and we don’t want to pass the costs on to you, tell these stations to play fair.”  And in the end, the channel goes dark for a few days, it comes back, and our cable bills go up.  Again.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

This was the same malarkey WXXA FOX-23 did earlier this year.  “Oh my God, you might not see the New York Giants in the NFC Championship Game – not to mention missing out on American Idol or Glee if we can’t get our signal out to you.”  And recently, we had to go through a long drought of unavailability for the MSG Network – and we ended up missing Jeremy Lin’s rise from injury replacement to Linsanity because of it.

The difference now is that we can’t just simply “turn off the cable” and watch WTEN over the air – at least not without a digital converter or a television that can pick up digital over-the-air signals.  We can’t break out the old rabbit ears any more.  Time Warner Cable is the dealer, the channels themselves are the drugs, and we’re hooked like Marie Winn predicted in her 1977 treatise The Plug-In Drug.

For me, there’s not much that WTEN currently offers that keeps my interest.  Yeah, I’ve been watching Once Upon A Time – it does have its moments, and I’m waiting for them to start importing every public domain fable from the works of Hans Christian Andersen, L. Frank Baum and Aesop – and I’m kinda curious to try the new show Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23, it looks like it could be a hit.

Would I miss my regular ABC shows?  Well, the lion’s share of those will be available either through ABC’s online in-demand viewing option, through Time Warner Cable’s Video On Demand service, or through Netflix or Hulu or iTunes.  And since I don’t often watch a show when it airs in real time, I can employ these options if WTEN gets dropped from Time Warner Cable.

Then there’s the local news.  We have WRGB and WNYT and WXXA and YNN already, so it’s not like I would miss out on televised newscasts.  Okay, I’d miss my fellow TU blogger Lydia Kulbida, so perhaps we can work out a trade to send her to YNN in exchange for Jo Dee Kenney.

In matrimonial law, there are three truths – his truth, her truth, and the truth in the middle that neither side wants to admit.  And the real fact of this dispute is that I feel like we’re not getting the complete story – not  from Time Warner, and not from WTEN.  We’re getting what both parties want us to see – both parties want us to be sympathetic to their cause, when we know full well that in the end, both parties will get what they want.  WTEN will get more money for being on Time Warner Cable, and Time Warner Cable will get more money from us for the privilege of watching WTEN, because we’re either too locked into our ways to invest in Verizon FIOS satellite or Dish Network or DirecTV – or we don’t want to go through the hassle of setting up our television so that we can get WTEN over-the-air.

And when public disputes like this occur – where we are treated to the equivalent of “Do what we want or we’ll take away your favorite TV shows and it’ll be all your fault,” I can only respond the way Mercutio did when Tybalt stabbed him.

“I am hurt.  A plague on both your houses.”

UPDATE: As of February 29, WTEN has announced on their website that they have reached a “short-term extension” with Time Warner Cable to remain on the cable system.  Gee, I wonder why they didn’t promote that news through a digital crawl on every TV show like Channel 10 did when they were begging us to contact Time Warner in case the station got dropped from the cable lineup… hmm…