On Monday, December 31st, 2012, representatives for Media General, the owners of WKRG-TV, and Time Warner Cable, a cable TV company, agreed to terms for a new retransmission consent contract which would allow Time Warner Cable and their client Bright House Networks, another cable TV company, to continue providing their cable TV customers programming from TV stations owned by Media General. If the representatives had not agreed to the terms, the cable TV systems owned by Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks in areas served by stations owned by Media General would have been required to stop providing programming from the stations after the previous retransmission consent contract between Time Warner Cable and Media General expired at 12:00 a.m. on Tuesday, January 1st, 2013.
WKRG-TV warned residents in their broadcast area served by the cable TV system in Cantonment, Florida owned by Bright House Networks about the possibility of the system no longer providing their programming by broadcasting a ticker with a scrolling message during their regular programming from Sunday, December 23rd until December 31st. The ticker usually appeared during the station's programming on an hourly basis for a few seconds except for times when the station was broadcasting local news programs and paid commercial programs (or infomercials).
Not only did the message in the ticker warn local TV viewers about the retransmission consent situation, it also suggested t they visit the World Wide Web site "Don't Drop WKRG" (the site was no longer available on January 1st ) for more information about the retransmission consent situation and suggested they contact Time Warner Cable with demands for them to continue providing programming from the station. The message also stated that folks willing to make such demands be 18 years of age or greater.
On the last day of the former retransmission consent contract, a message explaining the negotiations for a new contract appeared on the World Wide Web site Time Warner Cable Untangled. According to the message, the reason the negotiations continued until the last day of the former contract was because representatives for Time Warner Cable did not agree with Media General wanting to increase retransmission fees for their stations' streams of programming by 200 percent. According to the message, the representatives for Time Warner Cable were working toward a new contract that would allow Media General to raise their programming fees at a rate considered "reasonable" by members of Time Warner Cable (the terms for the new contract the representatives agreed upon were not released to the general public by their companies on January 1st).
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