Here's the Ryan Lair Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. If you get your television

channels through Spectrum Cable in New York, Los Angeles, or the other major market spectrum

serves, you may have discovered by now that some major channels have been blacked out

since last Thursday, ABC stations, ESPN, FX, Freeform, the Disney Channel, National Geographic,

all the channels owned by Disney, which is in a contract dispute with Charter Spectrum,

Charter is the parent company, over how much it pays, how much Disney pays for the privilege

of being carried on Spectrum's cable service. That has meant, for example, that you couldn't be

watching the US Open tennis tournament taking place in Queens, which ESPN is the Channel 4,

or maybe week one college football games. The ABC News special on the life of Chadwick

Bozeman last week, not available on Spectrum. But this is about much more than news and sports.

It applies to whatever you would watch on Channel 7 in New York and LA and all the shows on all

those Disney-owned channels. Now, this kind of thing has happened before. It's called a

carriage dispute, a dispute over who pays what for a TV service to carry your channels.

And on one level, it's a yawn. Two corporate giants tussling over which one makes more money

from our eyeballs, who really cares, who wins. But this one is different. People in the industry say

this one is about the very future of how people in the United States get television,

whether you currently have cable or streaming services, or whatever. It could all come to a head

in the next few days, because television's big moneymaker football season is about to begin,

including the first ABC ESPN Monday night football game next week, which is a particular interest in

New York, with the New York Jets and their new star quarterback Aaron Rogers against the Buffalo

Bills, also a New York team, in a week one marquee matchup. But again, this is about much more than

sports and much more than ABC or ESPN. It's about how and how much we pay to watch TV at all.

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