Business

‘ABC’ of TV battle: Time Warner Cable

In the long run, Disney’s feud with Cablevision over what the Long Island-based cable operator pays to carry ABC’s signal may have less to do with Cablevision than sending a message to Time Warner Cable.

With Disney’s distribution deal with Time Warner Cable, the nation’s second-largest cable operator with 13 million subscribers, set to expire at the end of August, much is at stake for both companies. Talks between the two sides are expected to begin in earnest shortly.

With 10 million more customers than Cablevision, getting Time Warner Cable to pay for Disney-owned ABC would be far more lucrative for the Mouse House, even at the same per-subscriber price Cablevision is paying to deliver the signal to its 3 million customers.

Industry observers said they knew that Disney wouldn’t get the monthly $1 per subscriber it was asking from Cablevision, but said the spat between the two companies was more about setting a baseline from which to begin talks with Time Warner Cable and, eventually, Comcast. Cablevision is believed to be paying about half of what Disney initially asked for.

The stakes are high for both companies. Besides being the No. 2 cable operator behind Comcast, Time Warner Cable owns systems in two of Disney’s most important markets, New York and Los Angeles.

Several observers saw Disney’s decision to let ABC go dark in the run-up to Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony as a not-so-subtle message to its larger rival that it would pursue the “nuclear” option if it needed to.

For its part, Time Warner Cable yesterday began girding its subscribers for battle.

“This current Cablevision versus ABC dispute is another example of what we have to deal with every day,” Time Warner Cable said in an e-mail to New York-area subscribers. “With your support we will fight programmers who request excessive price increases.”

That message harks back to the tussle between Fox and Time Warner Cable at the end of last year. Fox (which, like The Post, is owned by News Corp.) also sought a monthly fee of $1 per subscriber. However, analysts and sources said both sides ultimately settled on a deal valued at about half of that.