Sinclair Broadcasting and Insight Cable are facing down a December 31 deadline to renegotiate their existing carriage agreement.

If a deal is not reached by December 31, Sinclair-owned stations that are carried by Insight Cable will be blacked out. The affected stations are WDKY, in Lexington, KY; WSYX-WTTE in Columbus, OH; and WSTR in Cincinnati, OH.

“Like any business, we’re not prepared to sell our product if we can’t get what we think is an appropriate price for the product,” Barry Faber, executive vice president and general counsel for Sinclair, told the Lexington Herald-Leader.

Insight is currently being purchased by Time Warner Cable, which had their own retransmission dispute early this year. The Herald-Leader reports the carriage agreement between Sinclair and Insight will expire before that deal is completed.

With Sinclair Broadcast Group‘s retrans negotiations with Time Warner Cable going down to the wire, the company is prepared to pull 33 stations from the cable operator’s systems at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s.

TWC recently rejected an offer that would increase the monthly station license fee by roughly 10 cents per subscriber.  According to Sinclair, TWC has yet to make a counter-proposal.

The Baltimore-based company owns 20 Fox, 17 MyTV, 9 ABC, 9 CW, 2 CBS affiliates as well as one NBC affiliate.  They have stations in many top markets, including Minneapolis-St. Paul, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati.

Barry Faber, Sinclair’s EVP and general counsel bemoaned TWC’s hard line negotiating. “We simply do not understand why Time Warner insists on being treated better than its competition, rather than accepting our equitable proposal to provide them equivalent or better pricing than is paid by their competition,” he said.