Like everything else that you have to plug in, it’s a time of great change in television viewing. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine the next toy or technological advancement—Programming on your baseball cap? A TV chip surgically embedded in your brain? How about TV screens on the box of your TV dinner?

Who knows?

What we do know is this: In Western New York, people love their TV. They love old shows, new shows, reality shows, game shows, and shows about nothing. But with DVRs, hulu.com, Netflix, and other new technology taking hold, the traditional ways to pay for and receive television are changing daily.

Many local TV lovers subscribe to Time Warner Cable, but satellite services like DirecTV and DISH, and Verizon’s FiOS service are players in the TV delivery game, too. Figuring out how it all affects your TV, or where the MoneySmart-savvy viewer should go isn’t easy, especially since the major cable provider in the area has just announced a hefty rate increase.

So, to do our part, here is an interview TV expert Alan Pergament had recently with Time Warner’s Jeff Unaitis on the rate hike and immediate plans at Time Warner, as well as a peek into the different ways some local viewers are finding to save money on their in-home entertainment.

With the arrival of another unpopular rate hike and increased competition, Time Warner Cable wants to get its message out about plans that it expects will please its subscribers.

Jeff Unaitis, vice president of communications for TWC’s Upstate New York Division, had a good deal of news to announce in a recent interview:

The 24-hour news channel YNN —or Your News Now—will be the title of all TWC news channels across the state shortly to give it a “seamless news presence across the state.”

“You are beginning to see more shared coverage across the state,” said Unaitis.

Additionally, viewers in Western New York will get an upconverted HD version of YNN on Channel 709 by April or so. In other words, it isn’t shot in HD but it is HD quality. It already has been done on TWC’s news channel

in Syracuse. “The reality is when you are accustomed to see HD content going back to something that is standard digital, let alone analog, is more difficult viewing,” Unaitis said.

A new interactive, user-friendly, online programming guide will be available soon. One bonus: It will be easier to order On Demand titles.

In the next few months, the satellite feature celebrated in the ads with “Pysch” star Dule Hill that allows subscribers to program their DVRs remotely while they are away from home will soon be available to TWC subscribers with this guide.

TWC is looking at the possibility of expanding “significantly more” HD channels that the public has requested. BBCAmerica, Lifetime and all the Viacom channels (VH1, MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon among them) are among the most requested. “Some of them are contingent on carriage deals,” said Unaitis. “Others we do have the rights to carry, we just haven’t done the engineering required to have them yet.”

The popular Start Over feature — which is up to 90 channels here and allows viewers to start shows from the beginning during the time window it airs — will be augmented some time this year by a new “Look Back” feature. “Look Back” enables viewers to watch shows for up to 72 hours after they air rather than just the window in which they air.

Unaitis added that viewers may not realize that the Free on HD Demand channel offers subscribers many of the same programs that are available on Prime Time On Demand, but in HD.

That’s all good news for TWC subscribers. Now on to the perturbing questions:

Why isn’t Time Warner Sports- Net, the local sports channel, in HD? Will the Canadian channels be in HD anytime soon? Why can’t subscribers just pay for the cable channels they want in a so-called a la carte feature? How much does a WNY subscriber pay in his or her bill for YNN? How many subscribers are in the WNY division? Why does TWC cost more in WNY than in many markets across the country?

Unaitis explained it would cost millions in equipment to shoot local sports in HD and that wouldn’t be cost-effective. “For any local origination department like we have in Buffalo or any upstate locations, that is just cost-prohibited,” he said. However, he added that eventually the channel will be upconverted to HD, which will give it an HD-quality signal.

He doesn’t know if there are any plans to carry the Canadian channels in HD anytime soon, which is unfortunate since CTV has an extensive number of hours of the Vancouver Olympics in HD.

As far as the a la carte option, Unaitis said it would mean the end of several channels, the price of the survivors could go up and so would customer dissatisfaction over the departing stations.

“Two big issues,” said Unaitis. “Programmers rely on cable subscription fees to keep them afloat. Programmers have been reluctant to allow us to offer their channels a la carte and there are even some channels that won’t even allow us to put them on a tier because they are wanting eyeballs [for advertising].”

He added that some research shows that if only 20 channels survived “the cost of the 20 could be the same as you are paying today.”

Unaitis said the second problem with allowing a la carte is every TV set would need to have a box to authorize a customer to receive the channels they want and change their choices when they want to. “And people are still reluctant to want a box on every device,” he said.

“Programmers have been reluctant to allow it, technology doesn’t allow it,” he said of a la carte.

And then there’s the matter of consumer taste, he added.

“Every channel is somebody’s favorite channel,” he said. “It could be a shopping channel, it could be a religious channel. If you are required to move a channel that you think is not going to have a customer impact, for somebody out there, it is their favorite channel and it is going to impact that customer.”

He wouldn’t say what a subscriber pays TWC for YNN, but noted that it is part of the basic package that is regulated. “There would be some value assigned to YNN in our calculations for the basic rate,” he said.

He said TWC won’t say what it is paying each channel because it “is proprietary information” that TWC and the supplier have agreed to keep between themselves. TWC also uses the “proprietary” defense in no longer giving details on the number of subscribers here. The last available figure was 330,000 subscribers.

As far as higher rates here than elsewhere, Unaitis said he wasn’t sure if that was true.

If so, he speculated that weather, labor costs, high state taxes and building and maintaining the plant and other issues pertaining to WNY may make it more difficult to wire the area and more expensive to operate here.