Want to watch Houston hometown boy Bryan Caswell in Next Iron Chef Sunday night?

You're out of luck if you have AT&T U-verse. The Food Network (which shows Next Iron Chef), HGTV, the DIY Network, The Cooking Channel and Great American Country were all cut from AT&T U-verse's programming lineup Friday due to a distribution fees dispute with Scripps Networks, which owns the rights to those channels. Millions across the United States now suddenly find themselves without these channels — including AT&T U-verse's approximately 200,000 subscribers in Houston.

The Bayou City is a crucial market in AT&T U-verse's expansion visions, with the company running an aggressive ad campaign to try and sway customers to drop Comcast and go with U-Verse. Local AT&T U-Verse reps referred CultureMap to the statement from the company's national headquarters.

"We're extremely disappointed that Scripps Networks won't provide a fair deal for AT&T customers,” the statement reads. “Our team has been working for weeks to reach a fair agreement, but Scripps Networks ultimately refused to put in writing key terms that had been agreed upon verbally, leaving our customers without a fair deal as our extended contract expired."

In his own statement, Scripps Network president John Lansing fires back: "AT&T U-verse demanded unreasonably broad video rights for emerging media where business models have not even been established. Accepting their demands would have restrained our ability to deliver our content to our viewers in new and innovative ways."

The bottom line is that unless the sides come to an agreement, AT&T U-verse customers will be without the food, home design and decorating stalwarts. Dying to catch Caswell as he attempts the latest ingredient challenge shown in Next Iron Chef? You better know somebody with a different cable or satellite system.

AT&T U-verse customers will temporarily receive Bravo, TLC, Planet Green and CMT Pure Country without any additional charges, according to the company. Of course, that doesn't give them access to Next Iron Chef or the home-purchasing drama of House Hunters.

Disputes between channel carriers and content providers have become more and more common in recent years with programming often cut off as customers are caught in a high-stakes blinking contest between major corporations. AT&T U-verse cut the Hallmark Channel and the Hallmark Movie Channel from its lineup after a similar dispute on Sept. 1, hasn't put those channels back in since and hasn't given any indication that it will ever do so.

The most famous example of a channel vs. carrier dispute may be when the New York Yankees' YES Network and Cablevision went to war over the rights fees for the baseball team's network, cutting off more than three million New York area viewers from watching the most famous sports franchise in America for months. The relatively rareness of such a dispute at the time that YES debuted in 2002, plus the publicity-producing involvement of the Yankees, turned that battle into a national story covered by all the major U.S. network news shows and publications throughout the world.

How will Houston's AT&T U-verse customers react to losing several high-profile cable channels? If you have U-verse will you stick around to see what happens or bolt to a different operator that shows The Food Network and HGTV?