DirecTV

Dish Network and DirecTV are combining their sales efforts for addressable TV advertising for political campaigns.

The Weather Channel faces “severe operational and credit ramifications” if it can’t reach a deal with DirecTV to bring it back to the satellite company’s 20 million subscribers, according to Moody’s Investors Service.

The two companies pointed fingers at each other late Monday as a midnight ET deadline for renegotiation of carriage fees paid by DirecTV to The Weather Channel passed without an agreement. In a statement, David Kenny, CEO of The Weather Co., said he was “shocked” they could not come to an agreement.

DirecTV may be angling to drop The Weather Channel from its lineup, prompting The Weather Channel to launch a PR campaign to try and stop it. The carriage deal between the two parties expires Jan. 14. At risk for The Weather Channel is distribution to DirecTV’s 20 million subscribers.

For almost two decades, DirecTV’s Sunday Ticket package of National Football League games has been a superstar performer for the satellite broadcaster. But like any team with an aging and expensive player, DirecTV now has to decide whether to keep Sunday Ticket on its roster.

The National Football League and DirecTV are in advanced discussions to renew the satellite TV provider’s exclusive Sunday ticket package in a multi-year agreement, sources confirm.

The No. 1 satellite company will look at set-top box data to “determine cost/value tradeoffs” different channels offer — and then “prune/drop less popular channels when necessary” — it said today in an Investor Day gathering.

The satellite TV giant details an elaborate “ruse” that includes impersonation, uninvited house calls, phony complaints from neighbors and exploitation of the U.S. military to avoid early cancellation fees.

The No. 1 satellite company warns broadcasters that their rush to raise retransmission consent fees could backfire. DirecTV’s outlays to broadcast stations are up 50% this year, and that’s “not sustainable,” CEO Mike White told analysts today. If prices “continue to explode, then customers are going to demand other alternatives.” And DirecTV has done some R&D work to see whether it could offer broadcast TV the way Aereo does — using antennas to tap free over-the-air transmissions, without paying stations.

DirecTV, Time Warner Cable and Charter Communications are considering capturing free broadcast signals from TV networks to avoid paying billions of dollars in retransmission fees. “If found to be legal, the Aereo concept is very interesting, especially as it relates to retransmission consent fees,” says a TWC spokesperson.

Family run News-Press & Gazette has a relatively small chain of 13 stations mostly in Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon, Idaho  and Texas, including ABC affils in Palm Springs and Santa Barbara, Calif.; Colorado Springs and Grand Junction, Colo.; Idaho Falls, Idaho; Columbia, Mo.; and El Paso, Texas. The stations went dark today on DirecTV, as negotiations that continued after the previous deal expired on Sept. 30 finally fell apart.

Satellite TV companies are not like cable TV companies — and that’s a long-term problem. They don’t have the extra-revenue-generating businesses, especially home and mobile phone services, that cable TV operators have.

The two main satellite-television providers have struggled to adjust to today’s technology, as more Americans shun pricey TV subscriptions and watch video over the Internet. “The end game is near,” Todd Lowenstein, a portfolio manager at Highmark Capitol Management, says. “You have a mature and really structurally challenged satellite-TV business. Both companies are thinking about their next steps now.”

DirecTV said this morning that it had resolved a technical glitch which saw subscribers in several major markets lose access to local broadcast TV channels, including customers in New York, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Alabama, Illinois and Maine.

Speaking at the Goldman Sachs conference, DirecTV chairman and CEO Mike White said pay TV consolidation would be pro-consumer and pro-competition. “Content cost is a huge challenge for all the distributors,” he said.

Fox announced Thursday that its new national sports network — Fox Sports 1 — is set to bow Saturday with all major cable, satellite and telco TV operators, including late holdouts DirecTV, Dish Network and Time Warner Cable. FS1 will be distributed to about 90 million U.S. households, according to Fox.

Avoiding the carriage disputes that threatened to undermine their Aug, 17 launch, national cable channels Fox Sports 1 and Fox Sports 2 are on target for distribution deals with Time Warner Cable, Comcast, DirecTV and Dish, according to sources. While the ancestors for those channels, Speed and Fuel, had existing agreements with the distributors, terms had to be renegotiated given the higher profiles that FS1 and FS2 will have nationally.

The arrangement will give Rentrak access to second-by-second data from one million DirecTV homes to expand its national and local TV measurement products. Making the multi-year deal particularly interesting is that DirecTV agreed to sell the data directly to Rentrak.

Dish Network Chairman Charlie Ergen says large media companies are “essentially monopolies” whose market power is pushing pay TV providers toward consolidation — and added that a merger with DirecTV “makes a lot of sense strategically.”

The CBS affiliate in Odessa-Midland, Texas, has been taken off the air for local DirecTV customers after the satellite television provider and KOSA parent company ICA Broadcasting failed to reach an agreement, affecting about 20,000 customers.

Liberty Media Corp. Chairman John Malone urged fellow billionaire Charlie Ergen to combine Dish Network Corp. with DirecTV to get the advantages of bigger bulk in the pay-TV business. “It would be good if DirecTV could combine with Echo or Dish or whatever Charlie calls it now just because scale economics in the media business drives down costs and makes it possible for larger investment,” Malone said in an interview at the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Several companies put in initial bids to buy the video streaming service, and now it’s looking like both DirecTV and Time Warner also made follow-up offers.

Some of the nation’s biggest pay-TV distributors are seeking to secure so-called over-the-top, or OTT, rights from programmers, according to several industry executives. The efforts, if successful, could ultimately clear the way for the demise of the set-top box, which is how multichannel video program suppliers currently deliver content to customers. DirecTV, Time Warner Cable and Charter Communications are among the distributors that have aggressively sought OTTrights.

Hulu’s owners have extended the deadline for second-round bids until next week to allow DirecTV more time to line up financing. The satellite TV provider is expected to submit a bid of around $1 billion in the auction for the online video hub, sources say. DirecTV is competing with at least three other parties, according to sources.

Several sources with knowledge of the ongoing Hulu acquisition talks say that a deal is imminent and that DirecTV is the likely victor. The acquisition price will be written with a “B,” according to these sources, but just barely.

Consumers should get to choose which broadcast networks they want to pay to receive, a senior DirecTV executive told Congress today. In testimony to a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on communications and technology, DirecTV EVP Mike Palkovic said new rules are needed for broadcasters such as CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox when it comes to negotiating distribution contracts with pay TV distributors.

CBS CEO Leslie Moonves says he’s not losing sleep over Aereo. But DirecTV could bring some restless nights with the amount of money it could ultimately deny broadcasters. The satellite operator’s CFO Patrick Doyle said this week DirecTV has a fully legal way to avoid paying carriage costs — set-top-boxes with an antenna that picks up over-the-air signals. That could save DirecTV a fortune in what is becoming a fast-growing expense.

DirecTV is going to have to decide soon whether to punt or keep the football. The satellite broadcaster’s exclusive contract for rights to the National Football League’s Sunday Ticket package, which offers subscribers access to every game being played on Sunday afternoon, ends after the 2014 season. While that may seem like it is a long way off, typically the NFL likes to renegotiate its TV agreements a few years in advance of their expiration date.

There’s something to be said for DirecTV’s confidence in wading into the clutter. Over the next month-and-a-half, there are so many upfront and NewFront events, a perfect attendance record would probably mean major job failure. Now no one wants to be on the sidelines, from AMC to Zynga. Now count DirecTV in, as its first-ever event is scheduled for May 7.