DirecTV

The licensing agreement with Cineverse includes The Bob Ross Channel, Comedy Dynamics, Dove Channel and Dog Whisperer with Cesar Millan, while Scripps Networks’ Court TV and Scripps News all join DirecTV’s lineup today.

DirecTV has confirmed that it will appeal a federal judge in New York’s decision to throw out its antitrust lawsuit against Nexstar Media Group. The pay TV company has accused Nexstar of conspiring to fix broadcast retransmission license fees through management services agreements with smaller station groups Mission Broadcasting and White Knight.

A federal judge in New York on Wednesday tossed out DirecTV’s price-fixing case against three TV station owners – including Nexstar Media Group – on the basis that the satellite TV provider lacked antitrust standing to wage the court battle. DirecTV “has failed to show that it suffered ‘a special kind of antitrust injury,’ and therefore lacks antitrust standing to bring this suit,” U.S. District Judge P. Kevin Castel said in a 17-page opinion.

DirecTV said it would be allowing customers to opt out of receiving their local TV stations, and pay a lower monthly rate in the bargain. Customers who opt out of receiving local stations directly through DirecTV will receive discounts of $12 a month or $140 a year.

The customer count for the third largest U.S. pay TV operator remains one of the great known unknowns, but Leichtman Research Group hazards another informed guess in its latest quarterly cord-cutting tally.

DirecTV, long known as a satellite company, is launching a new ad campaign that says dishes are for the birds and that they should be streaming their TV. A new commercial entitled The Good Stuff features two pigeons on a rooftop who are surprised to notice a household watching “the good stuff” on DirecTV without a dish. The voices of the pigeons – Bobby and Frank – are supplied by Steve Buscemi and Henry Winkler.

The stations went dark on Feb. 3 as a result of a standoff between Cox and DirecTV. The impasse included 12 stations in nine metro areas.

DirecTV, locked in a new contract dispute with Cox Media Group since Feb. 2, is offering assistance to subscribers who have lost access to the Cox stations. Because the sides failed to reach a new carriage deal, DirecTV is no longer legally permitted to distribute 12 CMG stations in nine markets. The blackout, started after the previous contract expired, includes subscribers to DirectTV STREAM and U-verse. Via its TV Promise website, DirecTV has established a ZIP code-based search system to determine a customer’s eligibility for credits, which can take up two billing cycles to appear on bills.

Cox Media Group said its television stations are no longer available to DirecTV subscribers because of a retransmission consent dispute. The previous distribution agreement expired Feb. 2. CMG has 12 stations in nine markets.

No. 1 satellite TV provider DirecTV is raising compliance concerns with new billing protocols proposed last year by FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel. She wants cable and satellite TV providers to adhere to an “all-in” billing format, which means one price for video programming to be displayed as a prominent single line item on bills and in promotional materials. DirecTV spent time with FCC officials recently to underscore the company’s difficulties in meeting the FCC’s requirements while complying with similar but not identical rules across multiple jurisdictions.

After locking horns before agreeing to their last broadcast retransmission deal two years ago, DirecTV and Cox Media Group appear ready to do the old dance again, with the station group on Thursday evening accusing the pay TV operator of “attacking local journalism.” The current agreement expires on Feb. 2.

The new multiyear agreement covers the station group’s 64 owned stations in 51 markets and ends the blackout that began Nov. 30, 2023.

The National Football League isn’t officially saying anything yet, but the league just suffered a major loss. Failing to get the nearly decade-long antitrust lawsuit over the lucrative Sunday Ticket package thrown out of court, the Roger Goodell-run NFL is going to trial for potentially $6.1 billion just over a week after this year’s Super Bowl.

The biggest ratings force in American television is about to kick off high holy postseason services, but ridiculous impediments for the rapt audience await.

Some DirecTV customers were able to watch a national programming feed of NBC in areas where the local affiliate has been unavailable for weeks due to a prolonged dispute with Tegna, StreamTV Insider confirms. The test appears to be a first step toward replacing local broadcast affiliates with national network feeds in order to offset the loss of programming during programming disputes, like the one DirecTV currently faces with Tegna.

DirecTV is ready to provide national feeds of broadcast networks if and when it is allowed to do so, a move that could help it offset the loss of local channels during carriage disputes, DirecTV’s Chief Programming Executive Rob Thun says.

DirecTV is looking to establish a new regime for the distribution of TV stations, one it says would arrest the tide of TV station-caused price hikes and consumer anger over blackouts before the big game. The satellite TV provider with 11.8 million subscribers nationally is proposing a new a la carte model for the industry. The company wants to jettison the “retransmission consent” requirement in current law that says DirecTV must negotiate carriage with TV stations, even if it means losing stations in the absence of a mutual deal.

Dozens of TV stations owned by Tegna, most of them NBC and CBS affiliates, have gone dark on DirecTV in a carriage dispute. The companies failed to reach an agreement before a 5 p.m. PT deadline Thursday. The outage will immediately affect roughly 5 million customers in markets across the U.S.

For starters, Tegna and DirecTV had a carriage dispute in 2020that led to a 19-day channel blackout before the two sides finally reached a new deal. The disagreement was over how much the satellite service should pay to carry Tegna’s signals, just as it is now. But Tegna has been involved in several other fee fights over the last few years. The company clearly has no compunction allowing its channels to go dark if it helps get the best deal possible. Likewise, DirecTV this year had a 10-week blackout battle with Nexstar, a two-month dispute with Newsmax, and still has ongoing fights with Mission Broadcasting and White Knight.

Tegna is back on the rocks with DirecTV, signaling to viewers Saturday that its stations could soon be pulled off the programming grids of the pay TV operator’s platforms amid failing broadcast retransmission licensing negotiations. The broadcaster, which owns 64 network affiliates in 14 markets, told viewers with DirecTV satellite, DirecTV Stream and U-verse subscriptions that they could “lose” Tegna stations starting Nov. 30 without DirecTV agreeing to “fair, market-based” terms on broadcast retransmission licensing.

Together with Delta Air Lines and Viasat, DirecTV has announced the launch of a domestic 18-channel TV lineup on select Boeing 767-400 aircraft flying select long-haul domestic routes. This domestic live TV offering marks the first time a U.S.-based airline has integrated live TV into seatback screens onboard its widebody planes.

Diamond Sports yesterday filed a motion in bankruptcy court to compel DirecTV to pay for past carriage fees that Diamond says DirecTV owes it for carrying San Diego Padres and Arizona Diamondbacks games. The company, which owns the Bally Sports regional sports networks, and declared bankruptcy last March, alleges that DirecTV stopped paying the fees after Diamond over the summer ended its agreements to broadcast the Padres and Diamondbacks games.

AT&T Inc. has begun to explore options for its 70% stake in DirecTV as it approaches the end of an agreement under which it can legally sell its interest in America’s third-largest pay TV provider. Among AT&T’s options are: a dividend recapitalization, adding a new investor, or selling the stake and exiting the venture as early as August 2024, according to people familiar with the discussions, who asked not to be identified because the discussions aren’t public. A deal isn’t imminent and discussions are still in the early stages, they say. The current ownership structure may still continue as is.

Satellite distributor DirecTV has let executives at Warner Bros. Discovery know via letter that its executives believe the similarities between the two products violate the carriage contract between the two companies, according to a person familiar with the matter. The new CNN streaming service, CNN Max, just launched last week and includes many of programs that run on linear CNN, including CNN This Morning, The Lead With Jake Tapper and Anderson Cooper 360.

The pay TV company said Nexstar, which owns CW, had content from the network removed from Sinclair-owned affiliate streaming feeds in 21 DMAs.

Tell you one thing — DirecTV and Nexstar have beef. And plenty of it. But some of that discord got closer to resolution over the weekend, when the New York Supreme Court issued a summary judgment in favor of DirecTV, ruling that Nexstar Media Group breached a 2015 broadcast retransmission contract by not telling the satellite pay TV company that its Washington, D.C. station, then known as WHAG, was about to lose its NBC affiliation and become The CW station WDVM. The court ruled that Nexstar lured DirecTV into the 2015 deal “based on a misleading or materially incomplete representation that WHAG would continue its affiliation.”

A new survey from DirecTV found that one in five U.S. adults dropped a streaming service in the past three months, as many don’t feel their usage justifies the cost. Asked to rank the top three reasons they dropped a service, other cost concerns came into play: 30% wanted to lower entertainment costs overall, while a quarter said the service had raised its price. Beyond cost concerns, nearly a quarter said there wasn’t enough new content on the service or that they finished watching a show or movie that they had signed up to see in the first place.

Starting the classic television network is now available in high-definition across the U.S. with new DirecTV and DirecTV Stream agreements.

Earlier this week, DirecTV lost rights to Nexstar-owned locals, including ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC, because of a contract dispute. Now DirecTV has announced that customers affected by the blackout will receive a one-time $10 credit. The catch is DirecTV , U-Verse TV, and DirecTV Stream customers have to apply for the one-time credit as it will not be automatically included.

More than 10 million DirecTV customers are without Nexstar stations as of Sunday evening after the two companies failed to come to terms on a new deal. DirecTV removed Nexstar’s 159 TV stations from its satellite, cable and streaming systems as a result, which includes major broadcast networks CBS, Fox, ABC, NBC and The CW as well as NewsNation, the cable news channel. Subscribers in 113 markets, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Denver, are all affected.

Agreements covering 200 stations set to expire.

DirecTV Advertising has partnered with independent TV and cross-platform measurement, planning, analytics and attribution firm 605. Adding 605’s capabilities will provide DirecTV advertisers with more visibility into lower-funnel metrics, including sales lift, website activity, and geolocation visitation, complementing DirecTV’s D2C relationships, first-party data and audience-based media solutions, according to the television provider.

DirecTV is adding NFL RedZone to its lineup for the first time. The renewal, which was announced on Tuesday, keeps NFL Network on DirecTV and adds distribution on DirecTV Stream and U-verse. The NFL RedZone channel also will be carried on those platforms.