To the surprise of few, the war between CBS and Time Warner Cable has ended just prior to opening day of the 2013 NFL season. The two sides announced an agreement on Monday that restores the CBS network, and channels under its umbrella such as Showtime, to millions of cable subscribers in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and beyond.

“As in all of our negotiations, our main goal was to hold down costs and retain our ability to deliver a great video experience for our customers,” TWC said in a statement emailed to its customers Monday evening. “We’re pleased that we successfully achieved both.”

But despite TWC’s outwardly sunny disposition, The New York Times reports it was CBS who came out the victor in the dispute. While neither side has released specific financial details of the arrangement, both companies have indicated that the majority of CBS’ demands were met, including a significant increase in carriage fees and the retaining of the digital rights to its programming for redistribution to Amazon, Netflix and other Internet video providers.

Bloomberg Businessweek‘s report on the agreement points out that, in addition to football and other sports, CBS had another major negotiating leverage point with the upcoming show “The Crazy Ones,” starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Robin Williams. Gellar, who retains a sizable following on social media and elsewhere thanks to her cult hit “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” has the kind of built-in fanbase that virtually guarantees ratings success.

And over at the Daily Beast, Lloyd Grove assessed frustration in the TWC camp over the United States’ woefully outdated retransmission consent rules, which its CEO Glenn Britt believes to be “the primary reason cable bills are rising.” The crux of TWC’s position in the 32-day fight was protecting customers from yet another subscription rate hike, but if the subscription model itself were to become more flexible, viewers would be able to pay as much or as little as they wanted.

Brief Take: The winner in the war between these two media heavyweights appears to be CBS, underscoring the power content suppliers have over content distributors.

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