CBS and Time Warner Cable Call a Timeout in Dispute

The two sides in the confrontation between CBS and Time Warner Cable called for a timeout Wednesday night, hours before a deadline that might have removed CBS programs from the cable lineup in cities including New York and Los Angeles.

The two parties announced after 11 p.m. Wednesday that they had agreed to an extension of the current contract through 5 p.m. next Monday. The deadline had been 9 a.m. Thursday.

CBS had made public statements asking for an extension in the negotiations, while Time Warner Cable was holding off on agreeing to one. But the decision to extend makes a showdown much less likely. In previous standoffs between networks and cable companies over compensation for station signals, extensions have generally meant neither side wants to push the dispute to the point where cable customers lose access to channels.

CBS has been demanding an increase in the fees that the cable company pays to retransmit the signals of network stations to its customers. Time Warner Cable has labeled the CBS demands exorbitant. The two sides have both taken out ads denouncing the other as unreasonable, trying to lay the groundwork to blame the other party if the stations were made unavailable to the cable customers.

But despite many previous fractious negotiations over what is known as retransmission consent, CBS has never reached the point where an impasse led to programming being blocked on a cable system.