Time Warner Cable’s online streaming apps that deliver dozens of national cable networks to authenticated cable TV subscribers have never included local broadband television channels, until now.

The cable operator announced it has added 26 local stations to the lineup, but they are viewable only if you have Time Warner Cable service in the New York City region.

The new channels include primary over the air stations and digital “sub-channels” that include niche, classic, ethnic, and special interest programming:

• WCBS HDTV (CBS)
• WNBC HDTV (NBC)
• NBC NY Nonstop
• WNYW HD (Fox)
• WABC HDTV (ABC)
• Live Well HD
• WABC News Now
• WWOR HD (My9)
• WPIX-HD (PIX11)
• WPXN HD (ION)
• WXTV HD (Univision)
• WFUT HD (Telefutura)
• WNJU HD (Telemundo)
• WFME
• WLIW (PBS)
• World
• WLNY (TV 10/55)
• WMBC
• WNJN HD (or WNJB or NJN1) – PBS
• WNYE (NYC TV Life)
• WRNN
• WNET (Thirteen HD)
• V-ME
• Create
• Kids13
• Rise (Al Jazeera)

Time Warner says they have an interest in expanding local station streaming in other cities sometime this year.  When we know which cities and stations will be included, we will pass them along.

Last week’s shocking development that Cablevision, a major cable operator in greater New York City, New Jersey and Connecticut is not going to raise rates in 2012 is bad news for other cable operators itching to raise rates once again this year.

Cablevision’s decision was made as the company continues to battle Verizon FiOS, the phone company’s fiber-to-home-service across its service area.  Verizon has been playing hardball with Time Warner Cable, Comcast, and Cablevision in its metro New York service area, offering up to $500 in rebates to sign new customers.  That level of vicious competition has been great for consumers, but lousy for Wall Street.

Investors were not pleased with Cablevision’s pass on rate hikes and its intention to invest a lot more in system upgrades than originally planned.  Wall Street loves increased revenue and hates it when companies spend it on their customers.

With all of this competition breaking out, Comcast and Time Warner Cable may be more than a little uncomfortable sitting down at an antitrust hearing later this month to discuss their new agreement with Verizon to cross-market cable and mobile service.  In return for the cable industry signaling they will never compete with Verizon’s mobile phone offering, Verizon has generously purchased the cable industry’s leftover spectrum and agreed to pitch cable TV subscriptions to Verizon Wireless customers.  With this new “non-aggression treaty,” will there still be a need to offer $500 gift cards and cut-rate prices to attract new customers?  Consumer groups think not.

A greater percentage of Cablevision’s service area is served by Verizon’s fiber network than either Time Warner Cable or Comcast.  Competition is forcing Cablevision to rethink the usual cable industry plan for financial success — force channels customers don’t want and raise rates up to 5% a year to pay for the “increased costs of doing business.”  Consumers are fed up with $150 monthly cable bills and will take Verizon up on an offer than cuts rates $50 a month and hands over up to $500 just for saying “yes” to FiOS.

Both sides agree Time Warner Cable needs to add a new music channel, one owned by MSG parent Cablevision Industries, to your cable lineup.

Some suspicious Buffalo hockey fans suspect the real reason for the sudden focus towards a weekend resolution of a nearly two month dispute that kept MSG off Time Warner Cable customers’ screens since Jan. 1 is the fact the New York (City) Knicks are winning some basketball games and player Jeremy Lin is enjoying his “15 minutes of fame” in the national media spotlight.  Both companies announced the latest round of negotiations, held in New York City, have brought an end to the dispute.

Now that MSG is back on Time Warner Cable, neither company is getting a round of applause for finally reaching a deal.  In fact, a key provision of the settlement requires that the cable company add a new network — Fuse — to the cable lineup.  That means Time Warner Cable customers will eventually pay for a music channel they never asked to receive.

The New York Daily News is just the latest newspaper to put fans’ frustrations into print:

[MSG and Time Warner Cable] don’t give a damn about you.

[…] Fans once apathetic over the blackout and the lethargic Knicks are now fired up and vocal. They are calling TWC and MSG. They are making their feelings known inside the Valley of the Stupid, too.

At this point they are having little impact. The two sides said they recently met. How long? Five minutes? The response from the suits at both companies is the same. Their propaganda never changes. They are more interested in gift-wrapping their problem.

Instead of locking itself in a room for around-the-clock negotiating, TWC is taking fans to a Knicks game in Charlotte. Or MSG, catering to the Asian market it suddenly discovered, is throwing a Knicks viewing party at a Chinatown restaurant. This is known as manipulation. These are nothing more than visuals. They don’t change a damn thing.

The song remains the same: TWC says MSG is looking for a 53% increase in subscriber fees, which now, according to industry analysts, average just over $2.63 per customer. MSG responds by saying TWC is lying. TWC says in September MSG agreed to a 6.5% increase. MSG says that’s a lie, too.

Someone is lying. Everyone is lying. That’s part of the spin. Instead of taking it out on both sides for shafting you, they want you to choose sides, identify a bad guy. Don’t. When two lying swines are fighting in the slop, only a sucker would try to intervene.

After nearly two months of cable subscribers complaining they were paying for a sports channel they were not getting, everyone –and– the governor got involved.  But perhaps nothing motivated a resolution more than the sudden media spotlight on Knicks’ player Jeremy Lin, dubbed Linsanity.

“Linsanity helped,” Chris Marangi, a portfolio manager at Gamco Investors told Bloomberg News.  The investment firm owns about 5 million MSG shares and 500,000 Time Warner Cable shares. “Time Warner Cable realistically couldn’t have dropped MSG — it’s too important to too many fans in New York to not be carried. Both sides probably gave a little.”

While state politicians thanked each other for a “job well done,” Time Warner Cable subscribers won’t be getting a refund for a channel missing from their lineup for eight weeks.  But they will likely face a higher rate increase in 2013, in part to pay for a music channel few knew existed and even fewer wanted.

[flv width=”640″ height=”500″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WIVB Buffalo Fans React to MSG Deal 2-19-12.mp4[/flv]

WIVB in Buffalo explores the fallout of Time Warner Cable and MSG’s near-two-month dispute.  (2 minutes)

Liu

While Buffalo residents fume about missing the latest matchup between the Buffalo Sabres and Edmonton Oilers, the city of New York is pressuring Time Warner Cable to start compensating their subscribers for the loss of one of the most expensive channels on the basic cable dial.

New York City Comptroller John Liu has asked the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, which oversees cable franchise agreements for the city, to make certain Time Warner compensates customers for the loss of MSG and MSG Plus, both removed over a contract renewal dispute.

“Consumers deserve to be compensated for what they have gone through as a result of this dispute, plain and simple,” Mike Loughran, a spokesman for Liu, told Bloomberg News in an e-mail. Loughran said the comptroller’s office would discuss compensation plans with the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications.

Time Warner says it has already effectively compensated impacted customers, primarily in New York State, with a free month of the company’s added-cost sports programming tier.  Time Warner has also replaced the two MSG networks with NBA TV and NHL Network, which are now likely to remain part of the basic package even if Time Warner reaches an agreement with MSG.  (Sorry football fans, NFL Network is still too costly to be deemed a suitable replacement network.)

Time Warner says there is no way they would pay MSG’s asking price for a renewed carriage contract, which the cable company says represented a 53% rate increase.

As Stop the Cap! reported earlier, the dispute is renewing rumblings about how pay television providers handle expensive sports programming.  An increasing number of cable executives are considering breaking sports networks out of the basic cable package and forcing interested sports fans to pay extra to receive them.  But sports remains a lightning rod issue for many pay TV companies, both among subscribers and politicians.  Disrupt a major sporting event at your peril — something Cablevision learned from an earlier dispute with Fox.

In Buffalo, some customers are dropping Time Warner Cable for Verizon FiOS, at least where that fiber to the home service is available.  Residents served by Frontier Communications or Verizon’s DSL have fewer choices — one of two satellite TV companies.

Verizon already carries a standard definition feed of MSG Networks.  AT&T announced this week it was adding MSG in HD to its U-verse lineup in Connecticut.  MSG has spent this week rubbing salt in Time Warner’s wounds, throwing MSG viewing parties in both Buffalo and New York City.  Now that the city of New York is pressuring Time Warner to cough up refunds as much as $4 or more a month for the loss of MSG, the dispute could prove increasingly expensive.  Some customers tell Stop the Cap! they are already receiving informal compensation for the loss of MSG after contacting the cable company by phone or e-mail to complain.

“I wrote Time Warner on their web contact form and a representative gave me a $5 courtesy credit for the loss of the channels after I explained I was shopping around for another provider,” writes Neil Thomowski who lives in Cheektowaga, near Buffalo.

[flv width=”360″ height=”290″]http://www.phillipdampier.com/video/WNLO Buffalo Sabres fans dismayed by cable dispute 1-3-12.mp4[/flv]

Buffalo Sabres fans who have Time Warner Cable were left in the dark Tuesday night and couldn’t watch the match-up between the Sabres and the Edmonton Oilers.  WNLO in Buffalo has the story.  (2 minutes)

Verizon Wireless has confirmed a major LTE outage is impacting their data customers up and down the east coast as of late last night.

4G service works only intermittently this morning for impacted customers.  Many Verizon Wireless 4G phones are also not stepping down to the older 3G network properly during the outage, which means no data service at all, unless you are near a Wi-Fi hotspot.

The largest service area affected is New York City, but the outage is also impacting 4G customers in western New York, Pennsylvania, and northern Virginia.

Verizon has no estimated time when the problem will be repaired.

Updated 3:46pm ET — Readers report the outages now extend south into South Carolina, west into Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and one reader tells us service is out in California.  Verizon has acknowledged the problem on their Twitter channel, with no time estimates for repair.

Updated 4:58pm ET — Verizon is telling some customers the outage is impacting those with SIM cards, which effectively means LTE/4G.  Customers with 3G only phones still have access, but many 4G phone owners cannot downgrade to 3G service, even when they turn LTE off.