“I was sitting in front of my TV wondering, ‘What is going on?’ ” said Caren Crawford, who lives in Midtown, at a City Council hearing. “I find it incomprehensible and highly hubristic.”
Sitting behind Ms. Crawford in City Hall were representatives from the two parties responsible for a blackout that began Friday and caught millions of viewers in the country in the middle of a quarrel over the cost of putting broadcast stations on cable systems.
Concerned about New York viewers, the City Council called the hearing to try to get to the bottom of the matter. Though CBS and Time Warner dealt each other harsh words at the hearing, they said that they had resumed negotiations.
“The public is being used as poker chips” in a corporate game, said Daniel R. Garodnick, the chairman of the Council’s Committee on Consumer Affairs.
Rory Whelan, Time Warner Cable’s regional vice president for government relations, spoke of CBS’s behavior as “outrageous punitive conduct,” adding that it represented “the antithesis of acting in the public interest.”
He said Time Warner Cable had recently presented CBS with two new options to break the blackout. The first was an offer to secure the same terms and conditions of their last agreement, which started in 2008 and expired in June. The second was providing CBS programs on an à la carte basis.
CBS, Mr. Whelan said, “promptly rejected” the proposals.
After the Time Warner Cable testimony, Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, chastised Mr. Whelan for speaking as though Time Warner were “acting perfectly.”
“I am struck by the lack of any conciliatory tone,” she said, before leaving for an appointment.
Councilman Lewis A. Fidler lamented the price of cable service, stressing that both Time Warner Cable and CBS had left consumers in the dust.
“I don’t think that anyone talked to you in the ivory tower in which you sit,” Mr. Fidler yelled at Mr. Whelan, “about just how angry your customers are, with both of you, with both of you!”
Martin Franks, an executive vice president at CBS, then testified about CBS’s negotiating record. Since 2006, CBS has negotiated over 100 retransmission agreements, Mr. Franks said, “without even a hint of public discord, much less having our channels dropped. Until now.”
During the same period, he noted, Time Warner Cable had over 50 public disputes and subscriber disruptions.
Mr. Franks said that the renewal offer from Time Warner Cable was outdated since companies like Netflix and Amazon were hardly as prominent and multifaceted as they are today. He accused the cable company of pushing for a deal that would restrict CBS from doing business with those companies.
As the blackout goes into its seventh day and as CBS is scheduled to broadcast the final rounds of the P.G.A. Championship this weekend, the pressure is on to strike a deal.
The City Council is urging the federal government to intervene.
In a letter sent to the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday, Ms. Quinn, Mr. Garodnick and Mark Weprin, the chairman of the Council’s Zoning and Franchises Subcommittee, pleaded, “It’s imperative in these circumstances that all levels of government do whatever is in our power to look out for the public interest.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/09/nyregion/time-warner-cable-and-cbs-are-scolded-over-blackout.html?partner=rss&emc=rss