By KENNETH HART - The Independent
ASHLAND — Local cable television subscribers, fear not — WSAZ-TV won’t be going anywhere.
The station and Time Warner Cable have reached an agreement for the cable system to continue to carry WSAZ, according to a brief statement posted Friday on the station’s Web site.
Friday was the deadline for the two sides to come to an understanding. The retransmission pact between Time Warner and WSAZ was scheduled to expire at midnight.
The negotiations were acrimonious. WSAZ ran newspaper ads and aired commercials accusing Time Warner of lying to subscribers who called to ask why they might lose WSAZ — an allegation the cable company strongly denied.
Under the terms of the new agreement, Time Warner will carry MyZ, WSAZ’s new digital sister channel. MyZ will be on the basic cable tier in Ashland and on the digital tier in Portsmouth and Jackson, according to the Web site notice.
Carriage of MyZ had been the major sticking point in the talks. WSAZ wanted Time Warner to carry the channel on the basic tier, as other cable companies in the area have done. Time Warner resisted, saying it preferred to package MyZ on the digital tier.
The stakes were particularly high for University of Kentucky basketball fans because WSAZ has said it intends to move all of the Wildcat games it will broadcast to MyZ. The station said it had no choice but to do so because NBC won’t allow it to preempt network programming in order to show the games.
It wasn’t immediately known when MyZ will make its debut on Time Warner, or where it will be positioned in the cable lineup.
Neither Russ Pomfrey, general manager of the Time Warner cable office in Russell, nor WSAZ General Manager Don Ray could be reached for comment Friday.
“We couldn’t have reached this agreement without the support of our loyal viewers,” Ray said in a news release. “ Fifty-seven years of service to those communities paid off.”
