The city’s two largest and most powerful telecommunications companies left after a hearing at City Hall yesterday no closer to getting the New York Mets back on the air across the city.

Executives from Cablevision, whose MSG and Fox Sports New York channels televise Mets games, and from Time Warner Cable, which carries the two channels, provided a City Council committee with very different ideas on how to resolve a dispute that has deprived 2.4 million viewers of Mets baseball since March 7.

Cablevision is seeking to increase the fees Time Warner pays to carry the channels. Time Warner has been resisting. In the meantime, Cablevision has blacked out Mets games on Time Warner Cable, limiting Mets fans who subscribe to Time Warner to radio broadcasts and the few games that are broadcast on Channel 11 and the Fox network.

Cablevision argued that the two sides should enter into binding arbitration, in which a third party would decide how to resolve the dispute. An executive from Time Warner called that an “unacceptable choice,” saying that arbitration has been shown to increase prices for customers.

The president of Time Warner Cable of New York City, Howard Szarfarc, told the City Council Zoning and Franchises Committee that Cablevision was demanding higher fees for “shrinking” levels of programming. Time Warner has lost Yankees and Nets games and went without hockey this year because of the contract dispute between players and owners.

Cablevision executives said they had been negotiating for 14 months to no avail. Time Warner said that was untrue.

The chairman of the committee, Anthony Avella, offered his Lower Manhattan office for the two sides to sit down. Neither side took him up.

Mr. Avella said he would request “significant changes” in 2008 when franchises are up for renewal. After the hearing, he sought more specifics over how companies resolve deadlocked contract negotiations.

“I don’t care who claims victory. The only thing that I want to see is the Mets on the air tomorrow,” said Mr. Avella, a Mets fan.

He gave both sides until tomorrow to make headway. If they don’t, he said, he will publicly announce who he thinks is the “villain.”

Meanwhile, Mayor Bloomberg has his own beef with Cablevision for its efforts to derail his plans for a football stadium on Manhattan’s West Side. Despite calls for the mayor to step in and mediate, he said that it would be inappropriate given “what’s been going on.”

Last week on his radio show he pounded Cablevision, saying, “Just when you think a company can’t find any more ways to really stick it to the people of this city, they come up with another one.”

Several council members at the hearing said they regularly receive complaints from impassioned fans fed up with missing games.

“Let me tell you what you sound like to the typical Met fan on Staten Island,” said the council’s Republican minority leader, James Oddo. “It sounds like a bunch of rich suits who are tugging over money.”

Mr. Oddo didn’t even ask the executives appearing before the committee a question. He simply told them that fans were angry, and cited a Staten Island bar called Lee’s Tavern, which just signed up for satellite television to bypass the problem.

The attitude of the Mets fan, he said, is “to hell with all of you.” Then he chastised them to “just get it done” and buried his head in his hands.

Council Member Eric Gioia of Queens said that while there are some games that are still being televised on channels that are not operated by Time Warner, there is simply no way to know when a historic play could occur. And Council Member Melinda Katz, who is also from Queens, said she hears it from constituents all the time.