In a spat over money Time Warner has dropped WXII from your cable lineup. If you did not notice on Tuesday WXI was replaced by WBRE out of Wilkes-Barre, PA. This boils down to Time Warner being unable to negotiate a new contract with Hearst Television over rebroadcast fees. Time Warner of course says the fee increase wanted by Hearst is unreasonable while Hearst says it is inline with cost and other contracts they have.

If you have a digital TV with a Digital TV Antenna you may be able to watch WXII “over the air” but due to the changes from old school TV signals we have used for decades to the new digital spectrum your reception could vary greatly depending on where you live. Digital signals do not travel as far and are very line of sight so putting a small digital antenna on that basement TV is probably not going to work. The other problem is most TV’s must be set to “cable” or “antenna” requiring you to switch your TV to antenna, search for channels then finally view the available channels and repeating the whole process when you switch back to cable.

Of course now we have Nexstar Broadcasting which owns the Wilkes-Barre station is now saying Time Warner has misappropriated their broadcast and is threatening to take action against Time Warner for using it’s signal for viewing in the Winston-Salem market. One has to remember who gets to view what content is governed by a host of contracts between the various cable, TV, broadcasting companies and so forth. Just because WBRE is an NBC affiliate does not mean the money has changed hands to allow another market (Winston-Salem) to view a professional basketball game being broadcast in Pennsylvania’s market. There are other money considerations right down to the commercials being broadcast, those drug advertisements are very targeted to specific markets and they pay huge sums of money to air their adverts to specific, agreed upon market segments, do they get a free ride to now be broadcast in Winston-Salem or does the rebroadcasting of the Wilkes-Barre station require new contracts. These are the types of things being discussed and argued in these negations and in the meantime local citizens are in general unable to view local content and news.