Major cable providers and broadcast TV are at odds because the market place has become very fragmented. When you look at what advertisers pay money for - repeated exposure to target audiences - its easy to see the transformation from radio advertising in the 1950's to 2013. At one end of the spectrum, you were able to capture a large portion of the population in a single, Sunday radio show. Today, you only reach a sliver of the market place for a fraction of the time. Think of Tivo, DVR, and every other method to circumvent advertising and make TV schedules customizable to the individual.
Now that you dilluted the amount of money thats coming through advertising (dollars wise, you may not have, but when you account for inflation and market growth, you have) the providers and networks have to change their business models.
Now when you see what the providers have to do, to offer packages, that will command a reasonable price from the consumer - it becomes eye opening. If they can charge $40 for X amount of channels and CBS starts demanding $6 per viewer, instead of $4 - you can see that the provider either has to get the consumer to accept a $2 price increase or all of the other channels to accept less money. Except, all of the other channels are making the same power play to increase their prices. You have a handful of large players, Viacom, Disney, etc., etc. that are attempting to establish price increases across their 20 channels - but in reality, its the non broadcast providers that are growing at this point.
Long story short, it's a shit show and its been one in the making for years. In the New York market, there was a hold out between Cablevision and YES network over the same thing, probably 10 years ago at this point. As a population dominated by Yankee fans out here, it was a tough pill for Cablevision to swallow to piss off its customers, but at the end of the day, they couldn't set the precedent of allowing a station to set a large increase without drastically cutting their operating expenses/altering their business model or having that same consumer accept a price increase for a service they already believe is overpriced.
Unfortunately I've seen this coming for years. A family member is in cable TV sees and I've urged him at every chance to get out of the industry, because its a dying market. A stint in internet advertising sales, proved that sales there are different from newspaper sales where he once was to cable sales where he's been the last twenty years.