I think you'll find Newport is much to blame for this ... local television stations want cable providers to give them a slice of their revenue for the priveledge of carrying their station (which they broadcast over the air for free). Newport evidently has hiked the fees they want for this disproportionately and Verizon is pushing back. This is what is wrong with affiliate based local channel arrangements -- a leftover from before the digital era.
Frankly .. I'd like to see Verizon find another CBS signal (maybe from New York) that they could contract with to continue to bring the network to FiOS viewers and cut WHP completely out of the revenue stream. Unfortunately due to the affliiate model, that's unlikely to happen.
To prevent this from happening, each provider should be permitted to contract with two carriers of any particular network (and those carriers should be owned by different parties). If WHP 21 and WLYH 15 -- both CBS -- were required to be owned by two different parties, the outage would have been avoided and the negotiations would not have likely stalled. Better still, the affliate model should be gotten rid of entirely and providers should be allowed to competitively obtain programming.
As it is, I'm sure the channel will return soon -- as soon as both sides stop their posturing and get moving on productive negotiations. WHP is telling people to call Verizon to complain -- but you should also call WHP and complain.
