• by David Goetzl  @dgoetzl, July 25, 2013

Time Warner Cable and CBS have extended the deadline in their carriage dispute to Monday at 5 p.m., avoiding a potential blackout of CBS programming in much of New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere. The postponement likely means at least five more days of mudslinging between the sides, where rhetoric has the cable operator saying that CBS CEO Leslie Moonves “doesn’t seem to care” about consumers’ wallets.

Under a previous extension, the current deal was to expire early Thursday. CBS is seeking increases in how much Time Warner Cable (TWC) pays in retrans consent fees for the stations it owns in eight markets.

in addition to large swaths of New York, Los Angeles and Dallas, customers in Boston, Pittsburgh and Chicago would also be impacted if the standoff leads to stations going dark.

TWC says CBS wants it to pay 600% more than it does for the network’s content in other markets, and cites Moonves’ bullishness about retrans revenues on its TWCConversations.com microsite.

“Les Moonves, President and CEO of CBS, has always been outspoken about the programming fees he believes he deserves,” the text reads. “He has said ‘the sky is the limit’ when talking about the price he thinks he deserves for his CBS stations, and he clearly means it. He doesn’t seem to care about our customers’ budgets or the going rates for CBS programming.”

For its part, CBS is focusing on the content that could go off the air from “Under the Dome” to “The Big Bang Theory” to the PGA Championship in its advertising. The tone has taken on a certain urgency about time running out.

CBS has also been informing customers that TWC may drop the Showtime network, which it offers to all customers.

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