(5 January 2010 6:35 pm)

MUMBAI: Alleging that the cable operator refused to discuss a fair market price for carriage of HGTV and Food Network, Scripps Networks Interactive has pulled out the two lifestyle channels from Cablevision.

The two channels stopped being available on Cablevision at the end of 2009.

The platform said that it "offered Scripps the ability to continue delivering HGTV and Food Network to our customers while we negotiated a new agreement. But instead, with virtually no warning, Scripps took the extraordinary step of flipping a switch and removing its channels from Cablevision-effectively holding their own viewers hostage in order to pursue a more than 200 per cent fee increase from Cablevision and our customers.

In response, Scripps issued a statement that reads, "Scripps Networks Interactive has been trying to have productive negotiations with Cablevision for more than six months, but to no avail. Repeated requests to sit down together to discuss a fair market price for our networks have been rejected."

Under the current contracts, Cablevision pays Scripps about 25 cents per subscriber for the combination of Food Network and HGTV. "That combined rate is substantially lower than rates earned by other, individual top 10 cable networks and considerably less than rates Cablevision pays itself for less popular networks that it owns," Scripps said.

Cablevision services 3 million subscribers in the New York, Long Island and Tri-State region.