In case you forgot, Time Warner Cable and Sinclair Broadcasting only agreed to extend talks for two weeks on reaching a long term retransmission consent agreement that will keep 33 Sinclair-owned stations on the cable lineup.

On Thursday night, the latest deadline will expire, and Time Warner Cable is signaling negotiations are continuing, but do not look too promising.

In a prepared statement, Time Warner says Sinclair has summarily rejected every offer and has repeatedly claimed to “terminate” negotiations over the past three months.

The cable company has spent part of the last two weeks arranging for alternative program feeds from all four major networks should negotiations end without a final agreement.  That could be an important distinction for customers, most of whom watch Sinclair stations primarily for network programming.

“We will provide all available Big 4 network programming in the event that Sinclair takes away its signals,” said Rob Marcus, President and COO of Time Warner Cable. “We want our customers to remember that we’re fighting hard to contain the rising costs of broadcast programming. We are also still working to reach a long-term agreement with Sinclair before our current contract ends tomorrow night, and in fact discussions between the Time Warner Cable programming team and Sinclair have taken place as recently as this morning and are ongoing.”

But the two are still trading barbs.  As recently as today, the two were debating about how many customers would be impacted by a loss of the Sinclair signals.

The cable company said Sinclair was “inaccurately portraying” the number of impacted customers.

“Time Warner Cable has approximately 4 million customers who receive local broadcast stations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting,” a cable company statement said.