While much of Birmingham was seeing proof of our winter wonderland melt away earlier this month, a major deal was struck between the two largest cable providers in the United States. Neither one of them has a presence in the Birmingham market, though the proposed purchase of Time Warner Cable by Comcast could impact services provided by Bright House Networks.

The company, the nation’s sixth largest internet service provider is owned by Advance Publications. That New York-based company is also the parent company for the Alabama Media Group/AL.com.

The reason this matters is because Bright House Networks’s cable television carriage deals are still negotiated by Time Warner Cable – as pointed out in this piece published on the Tampa Bay Times’s website on February 13. If the merger is approved, it will . There hasn’t been a major carriage issue for the company since 2009, when a last-minute deal kept 11 Viacom stations, including MTV and Comedy Central, from disappearing off the station guide. 

Photo: Cables. DeclanTM/Flickr.