If Current TV misses the audience benchmark in two consecutive quarters, another clause is triggered that would allow Time Warner Cable to drop the channel. The condition was built into the most recent distribution pact between the two parties, which was signed in 2010.

"Time Warner Cable has been flirting with the idea of pulling Current off its systems for some time now," said one of the sources, who all spoke on condition of anonymity.

To make the egg on Current's face even tastier for Mr. Olbermann, an anonymous source informed Reuters that if not for Olbermann's now-defunct Countdown, "Current TV likely would have missed Time Warner Cable's viewership benchmark."

Mr. Olbermann, who regularly drew more than a million eyeballs a night in his prime slot at MSNBC, was averaging just 177,000 viewers a night on Current TV.

According to Reuters, Current is distributed to 60 million cable subscribers nationwide.

Just the facts, here:

The blackout of the MSG Network for Time-Warner Cable's 2.8 Million customers in New York City started on Sunday, January 1st.

35 days later, as MSG was still dark for Time-Warner customers, Jeremy Lin had his first breakout game with the New York Knicks, on Saturday, February 4th.

13 days later, the MSG/Time-Warner Cable standoff reportedly ends today, February 17, 2012.

Ever since the debut of Jeremy Lin, MSG stock has soared.

On the news that New Yorkers will be able to watch Jeremy Lin play on TV again, just now, MSG stock soared 4.4%:

To wit:

The cost of sports programming is on the rise globally as it is one of the few kinds of live programming still viewed by enough people to attract top advertising dollars. Other TV shows, such as dramas and comedies, are often taped and watched later, when viewers often fast-forward through commercials. TV ratings have jumped since Lin was entered into the starting lineup on Feb 6, according to MSG.

If Time-Warner Cable or MSG return the Observer's request for quote, we'll be sure to ask them the aforementioned question. Since they have not, The Observer cannot report MSG or Time-Warner Cable citing Jeremy Lin as the reason this dispute has ended.

Therefore, to editorialize for a moment, to not think Jeremy Lin is the reason Time-Warner and MSG ended the dispute would call into question one's standing as a sentient human being capable of the most rudimentary logic skills.

To celebrate the end of this standoff, here is Jeremy Lin, teaching you how to dougie.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

The New York Times' New York Knicks reporter Howard Beck just Tweeted out: "Knicks and Jeremy Lin will be coming back to Time Warner cable customers soon. Agreement reached." Times TV sports columnist Rich Sandovir notes: "Seven week impase resolved, with input from Gov. Cuomo and AG Schneiderman."

We've reached out to representatives from Time Warner-Cable and MSG Network; we'll update if they return with quote. The Times story, now up, notes Governor Andrew Cuomo's involvement in the dispute:

Cuomo’s intervention in the past 24 hours with James L. Dolan, the executive chairman of Madison Square Garden, and Glenn Britt, the chief executive of Time Warner Cable, accelerated the agreement.

Gov. Cuomo's statement:

"I applaud both Mr. Dolan and Mr. Britt and their companies. I thank them for being responsive to the needs of New Yorkers."

Thrilling stuff.

New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman tried to get involved early in the dispute to no avail, as did city comptroller Jonathan Liu and as of this morning, City Council speaker Christine Quinn.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

The dispute over licensing fees between Time-Warner Cable and Madison Square Garden Entertainment—which owns the New York Knicks and MSG TV—has blacked out the majority of Knicks coverage for New Yorkers since the beginning of 2012. In January, talks had completely stalled out.

The Observer has now learned that MSG Entertainment chairman James Dolan and Time-Warner Cable chairman Glenn A. Britt finally returned to the negotiating table earlier this week.

A source with intimate knowledge of the talks explained that Mr. Dolan and Mr. Britt "met Monday, and discussions have continued since then." That said, the source explained, "Don't get overly enthusiastic about it. The talks have yet to yield anything fruitful."

Regarding the renewed talks, representatives for Time-Warner declined to comment, and representatives for MSG have yet to return a request for comment. In this situation, however, some news is better than no news.

There's been no indication on who returned to the table first, but to call MSG's motivation to return to the table "renewed" would be to wrongly assume they had that much motivation to be there to begin with.

As the company held out through January, their stock ticker kept rising. Now that Jeremy Lin has exploded as an international sensation, what difference could Time-Warner's 2.8 million subscribers in New York City do for the network?

Quite a bit, actually. New York City is one of the most affluent sports markets in the country, and the MSG Network—whose stock has shot up since the Linsanity sensation started—could ratchet up advertiser fees with the renewed interest in the network's star franchise, which is to say nothing of Time-Warner's subscriber fees paid to MSG from each customer that they're still missing on their balance sheets.

Time-Warner's incentive to return to the negotiating table may be less urgent than MSG's. There aren't any readily available loss rates, but the idea of customers going through the pain of switching cable providers en masse to see one channel for one player on one NBA team—even if it is the market's home team—isn't very likely, and if it is, it likely wouldn't represent a majority mass of Time Warner's subscribers so much as supremely annoyed, die-hard Knicks fans. Even then, they'd have some hurdles to climb over, like happening to live in a building equipped for Verizon FIOS (not all of them are) or a south-facing wall they can use to mount something on (like, say, a DirectTV dish).

Linsanity isn't likely to go away any time soon. Whether or not 2.8 million New Yorkers will be able to participate in it before then remains to be seen. Here's hoping this is a good sign, however, and the first of many to come.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Here's the thing about New York City and Linsanity: We can feel it. We know it's there. But we can't see it. Since the beginning of the year, subscribers of Time-Warner Cable—New York City's largest cable provider—have been blacked out of watching a majority of the New York Knicks games. The reason? A licensing fee dispute between TWC and Madison Square Garden Entertainment, the company that owns the Knicks and the channel they're on, The MSG Network.

Before, New Yorkers were pissed. Now that their home team stumbled upon the NBA's largest sensation since the professional debut of LeBron James, they're furious, because as of today, the blackout is still ongoing.

These are the numbers behind it:

DAYS GO BY

• Days that Time-Warner Cable Subscribers Have Been Without MSG Channel: 47 days.
• Days since Jeremy Lin's first star-making Knicks game on Feb. 4: 12 days.
• Games since Jeremy Lin's first star-making Knicks game on Feb. 4: 7 games.

 
ON THE OUTS

• Estimated number of New York City's TWC subscribers: 2.8 Million subscribers.
• Number of Knicks games TWC subscribers will have missed in February without Time Warner Cable: 11 Knicks games.
• Number of Knicks games TWC subscribers can see if February without Time Warner Cable: 4 Knicks games.
• Number of New York Knicks, New Jersey Devils, New York Islanders, and New York Rangers games missed by Time-Warner Subscribers as of today: 147 Knicks, Devils, Islanders, and Rangers games.

 
THE DISPUTE

• Subscription fee increase Time-Warner Cable claims MSG initially agreed on: 6.5% fee increase
• Subscription fee increase Time-Warner Cable claims MSG ended up asking for: 53% fee increase.
• Subscription fee increase ESPN asked for in 2011: 7.88% (or $5.06) fee increase.

 
THE APOLOGIES?

• Number of Days since city comptroller Jonathan Liu lobbied for a reimbursement for TWC customers: 44 Days.
• TWC customer reimbursement fee city comptroller Jonathan Liu lobbied for: $5.95.
• TWC customer reimbursements TWC customers have actually seen: $0.00.
• Value of two-month "sports package" TWC gave customers after MSG outage: $5.95/Month, for two months.
• Amount one guy who complained to Time-Warner Cable enough got reimbursed for the Knicks outage: $2.60/Month, for two months.

 
SCALPER'S DELIGHT

• Percentage of New York Knicks ticket price increase in weeks following Carmello Anthony's 2011 trade to team: 25% ticket price increase.
• Percentage of New York Knicks ticket price increase in weeks following Jeremy Lin's breakout game: 33% ticket price increase.

 
$MSG's WINNING STREAK

• Stock movement of $MSG since TWC-MSG outage started: 11.59% stock increase.
• Stock movement of $MSG since Jeremy Lin's breakout game: 3.36% stock increase*.

 
$TWC's WINNING STREAK

• Stock movement of $TWC since TWC-MSG outage started: 20.53% stock increase.
• Stock movement of $MSG since Jeremy Lin's breakout game: 11.18% stock increase*.
• Estimated stock gains* Charles Dolan—MSG's largest shareholder—has made since Jeremy Lin's breakout game: $19.78 Million in Stock Gains.

 
WHAT'S LIN GOT TO DO WITH IT?

• Number of points Jeremy Lin has scored for New York Knicks in first five starts: 136 Points (or the most by any player since the ABA and NBA merged in 1976).
• How much Jeremy Lin is getting paid: $762,195, or the minimum for an NBA player in his second year.

 
[*As of 02/15/2012, with data provided by Standard & Poor's Capital IQ. Photo by Chris Trotman/Getty Images.]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Mr. Wilson was one of about 2.8 million people who found themselves unable to watch the Knicks game on their usual platform, Time Warner Cable. With his legions of techie followers, he’d found a work-around. He was one of the lucky ones.

The cable provider, which is the largest in New York City, is currently locked in a licensing fee dispute with Madison Square Garden Entertainment, the company that owns the New York Knicks, New York Rangers, Madison Square Garden, and the MSG Channel, among other holdings.

The dispute involves the channel. In its most simple distillation, MSG wants Time Warner to pay a certain amount of money per subscriber to carry it, what’s known as a “licensing fee.” Time Warner wants to pay less than what MSG is asking. Ever since the previous licensing contract expired on January 2 without a new deal in place, Time Warner subscribers who have clicked over to MSG have found, well, nothing. Time Warner offered up a month of their $5.95 sports package to compensate.

The MSG Channel shows about 60 percent of the Knicks and Rangers games New York-based fans could watch; the remainder Time Warner claims, can be found elsewhere on its channel lineup. That still leaves Knicks fans in the dark most nights.

Such showdowns are not uncommon in the cable industry: Viacom (MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon), the NFL Network, Starz!, and soccer channel GOL TV have all been involved in heated negotiations with TWC at one point or another.

The disputes tend to follow a familiar pattern: First, media stories about contracts expiring begin appearing. Then dueling ads turn up in print media blaming the other party for viewers’ deprivation of beloved programming and attempting to spark a deluge of phone calls. A local government official will usually condemn both parties and push the talks forward. Eventually, the dispute is resolved, stations flicker to life, and the earth spins on.

There have been a few other wrinkles this time around. Since the blackout started, MSG has been holding “viewing parties” at Manhattan bars, replete with free drinks, snacks, the MSG Network, and of course, staffers armed with iPads, directing attendees to sign petitions condemning Time Warner Cable via the website KeepMSG.com, which also suggests alternative cable providers. They even gave out T-shirts. In the run-up to the blackout, MSG began publishing full-page ads in local newspapers (which tend to be the beneficiaries of such battles).

What makes this particular licensing smackdown particularly interesting is the person on the opposite side of the negotiating table from Time Warner Cable: New York Knicks owner James Dolan.

Mr. Dolan is a well-known character. Tales of “his drug-and-drink-addled past, his volcanic temper, his shifting moods” were “legendary,” according to a Sports Illustrated profile that appeared in 2007, the same year he was successfully sued for $11.6M as a defendant alongside then-Knicks GM Isaiah Thomas in a sexual harassment complaint. He’s said to have instituted policies blacklisting any reporter or outlet critical of the New York Knicks, a motivation reportedly behind his firing of legendary Knicks sportscaster Marv Albert. He pulled a reported $1M. in advertising from The Village Voice in 2009, after this writer made an off-color remark about him on the newspaper’s website.

Mr. Dolan and MSG President Michael Bair did not respond to requests for comment for this article. An MSG spokesperson told The Observer that there has been “no meaningful dialogue between MSG and Time Warner Cable” during the continued negotiations.

Mr. Dolan is not only the president of the New York Knicks and MSG Entertainment, but he also happens to own Cablevision, a cable provider just like TWC, albeit with a much smaller market share. As such, he has been involved in licensing-fee disputes from both sides of the table: in his role as the president of MSG Entertainment, and as the president of Cablevision.

In one case, Cablevision subscribers in New York City and Philadelphia lost the ability to watch ABC the Sunday night of the 2010 Oscars. Service was restored at 8:50 PM, almost an hour into the ceremony. In October, subscribers lost access to all Fox-owned channels for 14 days, at which point Cablevision acquiesced to Fox’s demands “in principle.” By then, the Long Island-based cable provider’s subscribers had already missed the American League Championship Series—which the New York Yankees lost, by the way—and the first two games of the World Series.

Incidentally, Mr. Dolan was also front-and-center as one of the chief owners’ negotiators during the recent NBA lockout.

During TWC’s 2005 two-month contract dispute with the MSG Network, The New York Times called Cablevision, which then included MSG, “the G. Gordon Liddy of corporations, willing to hold a hand to the fire to maintain its principles.” Cable licensing-fee battles have been going on for three decades now. As detailed in James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales’ oral history of ESPN, Those Guys Have All The Fun, the first such beef happened in the early ’80s, when cable providers feared the entire industry was on the verge of collapse. Stocks were falling, and fledgling networks were dying off. ESPN decided to seize the moment and tap a new revenue stream by charging cable operators a fee. Their first target?

Cablevision.

“They all got really pissed,” then-ESPN lawyer Andy Brilliant recalled of the Dolan family in the book. “There was a lot of walking out of the room and throwing stuff around.” James Dolan’s father, Charles—then-CEO of Cablevision—“kind of sat there,” ESPN CEO Bill Grimes recalled.

Eventually, Cablevision caved to ESPN’s demands, forking over ten cents per household to continue carrying the fledgling sports channel. Had the elder Mr. Dolan held out, the industry might look very different today. ESPN may not exist at all, and hard as it is to imagine, cable itself may have gone the way of Betamax. Instead, the new revenue model was born—along with a series of contract squabbles that bedevil us to this day.

So how much money is at stake? According to BusinessWeek, in 2011, ESPN charged $5.06, a 7.88% uptick from the year before. So what could MSG—which is certainly no ESPN—be charging for its own rate increase?

In an investor relations statement issued by TWC on New Year’s Day, the provider’s vice president of content acquisition Mike Angus stated, “We had a deal within reach earlier this year. Despite agreeing to the asked for 6.5% price increase on rates that MSG themselves deemed as fair market rates just last year, MSG reneged on the deal and instead, demanded a whopping 53% increase and refused to negotiate further.”

A bump like that, particularly in this economy, would explain why TWC balked. But the figure has been disputed by MSG, which nonetheless declined to offer a number of its own.

Some insight into MSG’s tough negotiating stance may be found in Time Warner Cable’s decision to drop the Fuse Network in December. Fuse, a music network owned by the Dolans, hasn’t had much success as of late: the network, which the New York Post called James Dolan’s “baby,” was also dropped by the Dish Network in 2010.

Maybe Mr. Dolan is harboring a bit of a grudge.

Earlier this week, MSG and Time Warner Cable returned to the table at the request of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman. Meanwhile, New York City comptroller John Liu has attempted to capitalize on the public outrage by asking the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications to seek a $5.95 montly reimbursement for Time Warner customers who’ve lost out on the channels. “The least they could get is a break on their cable bill,” he fumed in a statement.

Despite taking a dip in October, Time Warner Cable stock has only risen since the onset of the dispute.

And although Cablevision was downgraded by five major bank analysts in December, it’s stock is beginning to gain on a two-point drop in October. Perhaps some investors were persuaded by a recent story by Matthew Flamm in Crain’s, which floated the notion that “Cablevision could peel off Time Warner subscribers in areas where the companies overlap.”

None of this will be any consolation to local Knicks fans, of course. By the way, they won last night. ’Melo looked great out there.

If only you could’ve seen it.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Jimmy Dolan: MSG Entertainment chairman, Cablevision president, New York Knicks owner, JD & The Straight Shot bandleader.

IT'S ENOUGH TO GET ONE'S KNICKERBOCKERS IN A TWIST. The MSG Network and Time Warner Cable—handily the largest cable provider in the five boroughs—are currently embroiled in heated negotiations. They're fighting over what the cable provider is willing to pay per customer for the MSG Network, which carries the New York Knicks' and New York Rangers' games. If both sides fail to come to an agreement, New Yorkers with Time Warner Cable won't get their Knicks and Rangers fix.

So the MSG Network has started a campaign, with wonderful posters like this:

But what kind of increase is the MSG Network asking for of Time Warner Cable? WNYC reports:

"We were very close to an agreement for a 6.5 percent price increase," said Eric Mangan, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable. "However, about two weeks ago, MSG reneged on that offer and is now demanding a whopping 53 percent increase."

That seems awfully high! Would the MSG network have any other potential motivations to put the squeeze on Time Warner Cable other than that of pure profit?

Funny you should ask.

• Madison Square Garden Entertainment owns the MSG Network, the Knicks, and the Rangers. The MSG Network carries the New York Knicks and the New York Rangers games.
• In 2010, Madison Square Garden Entertainment was spun off from Cablevision, who owned them.
• Cablevision is a cable network. As a cable network, they are a potential competitor of Time Warner Cable.
• James L. Dolan is the chief executive of both Cablevision and Madison Square Garden Entertainment (which includes the Knicks, and the MSG Network).
• Because James L. Dolan oversees Knicks, the channel carrying the Knicks, and a cable company that competes with other cable companies, he can apply the same costs to his own cable company for the MSG Network as he can other cable companies. [If he applied different costs, that'd be price gouging.] So he and MSG can just make the price high for everyone, including Cablevision.
• And if that high price is too much for anyone other than his own cable company (and a few others, maybe) to pay for, well, that's their problem. It's not like most of them can't switch to a different cable provider. Like Cablevision.

 
But the Knicks and their owners love New Yorkers and Knicks fans, right? And doing such a thing could be construed as a monopolistic practice, maybe, if they were still the same company (which they're technically not, but categorically—as in, "run by the same guy"—are). They'd never to that to anyone! It's not like there's precedent for this.

Except, there is.

From the New York Times, around the time when Cablevision spun off MSG Entertainment:

....Another potential reason for Cablevision to consider selling the Garden unit [is] namely the new Justice Department investigation into its monopolistic practices as reported in The Times last Saturday. Justice is supposedly acting on complaints by Verizon that Cablevision is improperly preventing them from buying sports shows and other programs that the cable companies produce. If you are a Verizon Fios TV subscriber, you won’t see Rangers and Knicks games in HD, programming that Cablevision reserves for its own customers and proudly trumpets in promotional materials.

And what did MSG have to say about any of this? Again, via WNYC:

MSG did not respond to inquiries about the dispute, but in a statement, Michael Bair, the president of MSG Media, said, "We have been attempting to negotiate a new agreement with Time Warner Cable for close to two years, and are simply asking them to pay fair and reasonable rates that are consistent with what other providers pay for our programming – nothing more."

Except, perhaps, a subscription to Cablevision. Which, for the record, again, totally spun them off last year around the same time they were being investigated for monopolistic practices, though they're not the same company, even though they have the same chairman whose interests in pricing out Cablevision/Optimum's competition like Time Warner are intrinsically interconnected.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

You have a very close relationship with Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. Tell us something we may not know about him.

Obviously he's very powerful, a television genius. Even his critics will cop to that. But he is also somebody who looks out for the people who work for him. A couple years ago, I had a very bad stalking problem. I was living alone in D.C. In addition to security Fox provided me, Roger offered to pay out of his own pocket for special dead bolts throughout my home. It was just a small thing, but he didn't have to do it. I had a boss who cared, and it made me feel better.

Do you think Fox is biased?

No. Fox News covers stories that some other news outlets won't cover. We ask some questions that other news outlets wouldn't ask. And sometimes that's perceived as bias by people who've grown up in a world where there are only liberal outlets.

She says that Glenn Beck did not harm Fox's credibility because he was clearly labeled as an "opinion host," and, later, that the problem with Jon Stewart is that people think The Daily Show is actual news that made an attempt to be fair.

Did a series of financial fiction in Le Monde lead to a 15% drop in share price for French bank Société Générale? Possibly, according to the New York Times! A few weeks after the bank was featured in the series, the London tabloid The Mail ran a speculative news story about Société Générale's imminent collapse, perhaps based rumors sparked by a lousy translation. It turns out the bank's doing fine; The Mail issued an apology. (The denouement of the fictional series, ironically, is that British journalists fuel rumors that lead to the demise of the Euro.) The series was controversial within France for political reasons. Quelle yarn! Read-le!

Time Warner Cable is in talks to purchase Insight Communications Co., the country's ninth largest cable provider, for $3B., reports Bloomberg and others. Never heard of them? They service customers in Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio.

How are things over at AOL? The Wall Street Journal reports that traffic is up 3%, thanks to the Huffington Post, but barely covering the dips at their old properties.  37% of AOL's revenue still comes from subscriptions and 16% is tied to Web-search advertising--revenues from which declined more than 20% in the second quarter.

Twitter is making us poor readers, according to The Guardian, and killing off big ideas, according to The New York Times. Bill Keller is waiting for a high five somewhere.

One comparatively easy way to take the city's temperature as its health gets sorted out is to follow the stocks that define it. We assembled the Observer 100 Index to watch the city wheeze, cough, sigh, and sing.

The rule was to pick the public American stocks (which means no LVMH, which is foreign, no Condé Nast, which is private, and no Ikea, which is both) that have woven themselves into New York's chromosomes. See them here.

The index's companies send Manhattan its envelopes of movies, market its anti-anxiety drugs, make its k-cups of pressurized coffee grounds, put on its concerts, and lend and manhandle its money. Some are nefarious (the Altria Group is Philip Morris renamed), expensive (Coach), omnipotent (Goldman) and benign (John Wiley and Sons). Some are all those things but also inconspicuous--like Fortune Brands, which, if you're a certain type, makes your bourbon, golf balls, and kitchen faucet.

We'll tally the two that rose and fell the hardest over the past week. Only one presidential administration ago, the inaugural winner and loser--see the image above--both belonged to the same gargantuan conglomerate, which is as good a way to begin as any.

One comparatively easy way to take the city's temperature as its health gets sorted out is to follow the stocks that define it. We assembled the Observer...