Six weeks after the Yankees' season ended, one of the region's cable providers, Comcast, dropped the YES Network, the team's regional sports network since 2002.

When Comcast pulled the plug, about 900,000 cable customers in North Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania lost coverage of the network that broadcasts the Yankees, Brooklyn Nets, and New York FC soccer club. (FOX owns 80 percent of YES; the Yankees control the rest.)

Comcast and YES disagree about the cost of providing coverage. The negotiations, which reached an impasse in November, have not progressed any further.

NJ Advance Media spoke this week to Comcast and YES about the dispute, and sources said both sides remain steadfast in their positions.

Comcast claims that Yankees viewership does not justify the price that the YES Network is charging, said to be $5 to $6 per subscriber.

YES insists its property is worth the price, and points out that Comcast had been paying the agreed upon rate (reportedly a 33-percent increase in fees) since March of 2015 by way of several fee extensions -- a common practice in broadcasting -- after the previous contract expired.

YES said it charges its other, larger affiliates in the area the same price per subscriber as Comcast. (Cablevision and Time Warner are among the other cable providers in the area.)

Comcast contends that viewership on YES for Yankees games is low -- "over 90 percent of our 900,000-plus customers who receive YES Network didn't watch the equivalent of even one quarter of those [130 baseball] games," Comcast said in a statement last November and confirmed again this week.

The YES Network cites Nielsen's ratings -- the most widely used metric to track television audiences -- that reported Yankees viewership was up 18-percent from the All-Star break in 2015 to the end of the season.

"That's fact," a YES Network executive told NJ Advance. "Whatever mythical test that Comcast is applying to determine whether the Yankees or YES are worth it ... if they are not worth it, then what does that say about the Mets and SNY and about the Phillies, and Comcast Philadelphia?"

Comcast said when other regional sports network deals are up, they are treated the same as the YES Network.

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YES says the Yankees have been the No. 1-watched regional sports network in the country for the past 10 years, although, of course, it operates in the No. 1 media market in the country.

Another issue is timing. YES contends Comcast waited until the end of the baseball season to pull the plug, when leverage was back on its side. Had Comcast dropped YES during the season, customers would have been upset, so it waited until the backlash was minimized, YES said.

Comcast said there was no purposeful delay, that it took until late summer for viewership numbers to settle and see that it was low. While the Yankees are a larger draw than the Nets, the latter's season had just started, so Comcast wasn't necessarily pulling out during a total live action sports lull.

Part of those rate demands, YES said, stems from the fact that the Yankees continuously put one of the best products on the field. In 2009, the year they won the World Series, the previous winter CC Sabathia and Mark Teixeira were signed to long deals.

"What other baseball team [goes to the playoffs] 18 of 21 years?" a YES executive said. "We're in New York. History and tradition, the stars. You get what you pay for."

The only thing the two sides seem to agree on? A resolution, if it happens at all, won't come soon.

"It will come down to the wire," a YES executive said.

Yankees Opening Day is April 4 at home against the Astros.

Ryan Hatch may be reached at rhatch@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @ryanhatch. Find NJ.com on Facebook.