KITV-Oceanic fight remains unresolved

KITV parent company Hearst Television Inc. is awaiting a response from Time Warner Cable to the program carriage proposal submitted Tuesday, a week into the blackout resulting from a contract dispute.

While still viewable over-the-air, via satellite services DISH Network and DirecTV or via Hawaiian Telcom, KITV has been unavailable to the majority of Hawaii viewers — via Oceanic Time Warner Cable — since July 10. The cable company has replaced KITV programming with the Hallmark Channel.

Hearst Television’s offer to Time Warner is within 5 percent of the cable company’s most recent offer to Hearst, yet Time Warner has failed to respond, Hearst said in a statement.

"As of today, Time Warner Cable is attempting to portray a stalemate — when none exists," said Hearst Television President David Barrett.

"This dispute is ripe for settlement," he said.

The National Association of Broadcasters in a statement sympathized with viewers who are "used as pawns by Time Warner Cable, DISH Network and DirecTV in program carriage disputes," said Dennis Wharton, NAB executive vice president of communications.

"Negotiations are ongoing," said a statement from Time Warner Cable corporate offices in New York to its Oceanic offices. The memo confirmed that its lead negotiator met with Hearst officials Tuesday and confirmed receipt of a written proposal Tuesday night. The statement offered no other details.

On its webpage devoted to carriage disputes, Time Warner Cable asserts that it is fighting rising costs and that one cause of rising cable prices is "higher fees being demanded by greedy broadcasters."

Broadcast industry writer Harry Jessell reported in an editorial last week that increases broadcasters sought are "justified," citing that while broadcast stations account for about 35 percent of all viewership, "they received only 6.7 percent of the $30.9 billion that (multichannel video programming distributors) will pay to all programmers this year." Another independent study conducted by TV consulting firm Carmel Group confirmed a previously acknowledged disparity in the number of viewers of broadcast programming versus cable show viewers.

The 2010 study, posted Monday on the Multichannel News website, also measured fees that cable and satellite companies pay to cable programming companies and to broadcasters, finding a disparity weighted toward cable channels that don’t bring in as many viewers.

The Carmel Group estimates that the group of popular cable channels it studied received slightly more than 45 cents per subscriber per month in 2011, versus the slightly more than 35 cents paid to the broadcast networks.

"Based upon ratings and customer fees, broadcasters are putting out better content and getting paid less for it," said study author Jimmy Schaeffler, Carmel Group chairman and chief service officer.

KITV4 launched an online campaign using a picture of talk show hosts Ellen Degeneres and Dr. Oz, and news anchors Paula Akana and Mahealani Richardson captioned, "I want my KITV back," and inviting viewers to get involved.