And the award for most dramatic ending goes to . . .
Just 13 minutes after the start of the Oscars last night, Cablevision customers got back WABC shows after a nearly daylong blackout.
“We are happy to report that WABC Channel 7 has returned to Cablevision’s 3 million New York-area homes,” said Charles Schueler, a Cablevision spokesman.
The decision came at 8:43 p.m.; the broadcast began at 8:30 p.m.
Cablevision subscribers had been left with blank screens when they turned on the Walt Disney Co.-owned channel after midnight Saturday. One of the few options to get ABC during the blackout was the old-fashioned way — with an antenna.
The standoff affected subscribers in parts of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut — the first time in a decade a major broadcast station went dark in a dispute with a cable company.
ABC and Cablevision have been fighting over how much money the cable company should pay to carry the network’s free-to-air broadcast signals.
Terms of the deal restoring service were not immediately known.