Wednesday, January 28, 2009
The CW’s hit show “Gossip Girl” used to be a Monday night fixture for Julie Leider and her friends. Not anymore.
Kansas City’s CW and ABC affiliates, KCWE and KMBC, respectively, were pulled off Sunflower Broadband’s lineup on Jan. 1 because the companies could not agree on the terms of a retransmission agreement.
Leider, Chicago junior, said she and her friends weren’t happy about losing some of their favorite CW programs, shown on Sunflower’s Channel 17. Leider and others have resorted to watching CW shows online. She said it wasn’t always easy with Internet providers charging for broadband overages.
“You can’t watch it online with your friends like you can on TV,” Leider said. “You can’t just all sit around a laptop.”
Rod Kutemeier, general manager of Sunflower Broadband, said the Lawrence cable provider was notified on Dec. 31 that it would have to discontinue airing the stations after failing to reach an agreement from negotiations that began in November. Kutemeier said KMBC asked for three times the amount other Kansas City stations asked for.
“They purposely notified us on the last day of the month,” Kutemeier said. “We were under the impression that we would receive an extension to carry the stations.”
Kutemeier said he thought KMBC pulled the stations in order to pressure the provider to settle faster and at a higher cost.
Wayne Godsey, president and general manager of KMBC and KCWE, said Sunflower Broadband represented only 30,000 of the 900,000 viewers in and around the Kansas City area. He said KMBC, aired locally on Channel 9, had historically been one of the most-viewed stations on Sunflower Broadband.
“The compensation we have requested from Sunflower Broadband is a small fraction of the fee it charges its subscribers and is well below what cable companies like Sunflower pay for other, less popular programming,” Godsey said.
Godsey said the offer made to Sunflower represented a per-subscriber rate identical to offers it made to other cable providers.
“If we were to make a more favorable deal with them,” Godsey said, “imagine the problems it would create with other companies.”
Kutemeier and Godsey agreed they were looking forward to reaching an agreement and getting the two stations back into Sunflower Broadband’s lineup.
In the meantime, customers can continue to view ABC programming on the Topeka affiliate KTKA channel 12. Both KCWE and KMBC are still available to DirecTV and Dish Network subscribers as well.
“I just don’t understand why they haven’t gotten it fixed yet, or sent out a letter to customers or anything,” Leider said. “It’s really frustrating.”
— — Edited by Chris Horn
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Comments
Popular channels yanked from Sunflower
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Popular channels yanked from Sunflower
This must have been pretty devastating to all the 13yr olds in the Lawrence area.
If your reading this and your not 13... maybe let's say perhaps 19 of age and in a sorority. Just look around you, you are the show! By the way your sisters talk smack about you when your not around...I'd sleep with their boyfriends to get back at them.
If your above 20 go watch something with some caliber. 35 and single? Your life has been sad and thus you need to relive it by watching this dumb program... I feel your pain. I'd start writing convicts to try to connect with someone in your life for once.
Popular channels yanked from Sunflower
Ditch Sunflower! Erect an antenna outside or use an indoor antenna. Be sure to get a DTV converter box if you don't have one or your TV isn't new enough to receive a digital signal. Then you can get all of the broadcast stations, free of charge, and even some programming in HD (with an HDTV). It's wonderful what the digital transition is doing for receiving free over-the-air programming.
(Note: You'll be SOL if you do this and really must have a cable-only channel. However, if you rarely watch those shows anyway, and/or they're online, you might save a lot of money by switching to antenna reception! I did!)
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