retrans

The multi-year distribution agreement covers Nexstar’s KHON and KHII Honolulu, NewsNation and digital subchannel Rewind TV

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

Cable operator Hawaiian Telcom has lobbed fresh accusations against broadcaster Nexstar Media Group over its ongoing carriage dispute involving several TV channels. On Monday, attorneys representing Hawaiian Telcom said it had reached an “agreement in principle” with Nexstar to return KHON (Fox and CW), KHII (MNT) and NewsNation to its cable TV platform, but the deal ultimately fell apart after Nexstar sprang a number of demands on the telecom at the last minute.

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.”

Nexstar has spent the past two years building its national media business with The CW as a central part of that strategy. The CW will soon be put to the test as its third iteration hits viewers.

Despite cord-cutting eroding the number of pay TV subscribers, station revenue from retransmission and carriage fees from distributors rose 3% to $14.46 billion in 2022, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. S&P sees rate hikes in deals renewed in 2023 slightly outpacing the cord-cutting trend, resulting in a 3% gain in gross retransmission and subscriber fee revenues to $14.83 billion.

A federal judge denied Dish Network’s motion seeking to have 17 words describing how much Dish was willing to pay Circle City to carry its Indianapolis television stations deleted from the court’s decision dismissing Circle City’s discrimination suit against Dish. Circle City claimed that after it acquired WISH and WNDY from Nexstar Media Group, Dish wanted to cut how much it paid for the stations retransmission rights because Circle City was a Black-owned media company, leading to a blackout of the stations.

Frontier Communications has become the latest pay TV operator to drop/lose carriage of far right channel Newsmax. “Our contract with Newsmax TV expired and we made the business decision not to renew our agreement,” Frontier said in a statement on its website. The telecom, which reported 306,000 remaining TV/video customers at the end of 2022, also said that it has stopped carrying Fuse Media channels Fuse and FM.

CBS local affiliates have rejoined Fubo’s virtual MVPD TV lineup after being pulled from the live streaming TV service earlier this year amid a renewal spat with Paramount Global. On Friday a Fubo spokesperson said: “Virtually all CBS local affiliates have returned to Fubo and are now live.” It marks the latest resolution in a somewhat messy carriage dispute that pitted the CBS affiliate board and its represented local station owners against Paramount Global.

A U.S. District Court Judge on Friday dismissed lawsuits brought by Circle City Broadcasting charging that DirecTV and Dish discriminated against Circle City because it was a Black-owned business. Circle City owner Dujuan McCoy said he planned to appeal the decision. He also said he would work to prevent DirecTV and Dish from merging.

Mission and White Knight stations, which are largely managed by Nexstar, have been blacked out on DirecTV platforms since October.

The CBS affiliate board has endorsed a new carriage proposal from Paramount Global that will keep affiliated stations’ feeds on Paramount Plus, Hulu Plus Live TV and YouTube TV and return them to FuboTV. Affiliates were informed of the new agreement in principle Friday morning, according to a station executive. The proposed deal could head off a period in which relations between networks and affiliates could have turned stormy.

Sinclair Broadcast Group’s ABC affiliates have been dropped from the Hulu Plus Live TV lineup in a dispute between the station owner and The Walt Disney Co., which controls Hulu and owns ABC. Virtual multichannel video programming distributors like Hulu Plus Live, YouTube TV and FuboTV don’t negotiate directly with stations for their retransmission rights. Instead, vMVPD deals are negotiated by the networks, which negotiate terms for their affiliates.

Despite an impasse between Paramount Global and FuboTV, which has kept Nexstar stations off the air for weeks, Nexstar President and COO Tom Carter has a relatively upbeat outlook on pay-TV’s future. “We are projecting subscriber attrition,” he said, with recent gains on internet-delivered bundles like Fubo, YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV and others failing to offset deeper declines in traditional cable and satellite. “But make no mistake about it — we do not see a cliff. We’re not at a precipice here, or at a point in time where we’re at an inflection point.”

Paramount Global is using its latest Fubo TV negotiation to offer an untenable deal to affiliates and reset the entire retransmission consent landscape. The FCC’s response should be obvious: Make everyone play by the same rules.

Looking at the trouble regional sports networks are having getting distributors to pay for local sports and at CBS affiliates pulling their local feeds from vMVPD FuboTV, Lightshed partners analyst Rich Greenfield is questioning whether the retransmission gravy train for TV broadcasters has left the station.

“No other company has a right to negotiate on behalf of my company without our consent,” said Gray Chairman-CEO Hilton Howell. “I have no intention of negotiating in public, or criticizing anyone anywhere.”

“The next step for retrans is down, not up,” the Dish chairman says while drawing his typically hard line amid a protracted impasse with Cox Media Group.

hree weeks into its carriage dispute with Newsmax, DirecTV has called out the ultra-conservative media company for using its “news/editorial platform” to wage what it views as simply a business negotiation. “It’s troubling that Newsmax is using its news/editorial platform to publish inaccurate and misleading information regarding our contract dispute,” wrote Michael Hartman, DirecTV general counsel and chief external affairs officer.

The FCC’s Diversity Symposium on Feb. 7 turned into a retransmission consent showdown for a little while. Perhaps that is to be expected given that the first panel featured the chair of ACA Connects as well as the CEO of Circle City Broadcasting, which is suing DirecTV and Dish Network over retrans.

Under siege from Republicans and conservatives, DirecTV on Sunday said it was still interested in bringing back right-wing news channel Newsmax. DirecTV dropped Newsmax prompting concerns among some lawmakers about censorship and conservative views being stifled. The satellite company seemed to be extending an olive branch on its website, where it made a statement concerning Newsmax. DirecTV remained adamant that it will not pay the license fee that Newsmax is demanding.

The blackout of CBS affiliates on FuboTV reflects the increasing tension between broadcast networks and their affiliates as TV pivots to streaming. “Having worked around public and private TV broadcasters these last few years, we think dynamics between national networks and station operators are increasingly strained,” Wells Fargo media analyst Steven Cahall said.

Paramount Global will provide FuboTV with a CBS network feed — stripped of local programming — to stream in markets where CBS affiliates turned down a distribution fee deal negotiated by the network. According to a confidential memo sent to affiliates by the CBS affiliate board, CBS set a 5 p.m. Friday (Jan. 27) deadline for stations to opt in or out of the deal. In markets where stations opt out, their programming will be replaced with the network feed on Fubo effective today at 5 p.m. The national feed, including sports and primetime shows, with use content from the CBS News Streaming Network to replace a station’s local programming including local newscasts, CBS said. The new deal would run until after CBS airs the Super Bowl in 2024.

Paramount told CBS affiliates that they had until 5 p.m. today to agree to a retransmission consent deal that it had struck with Fubo or they would replace them on the vMVPD with a CBS “network feed” without the affiliates’ local programming, according to a CBS affiliate board email sent Friday afternoon to its members.

DirecTV stopped carrying Newsmax when an extension of their carriage agreement expired at 11:59 p.m. ET Tuesday in a move that could have repercussions in Washington. DirecTV, one of the first distributors to carry Newsmax, said it ceased carrying Newsmax because the conservative news network was seeking a carriage fee after being available free previously.

The deal ensures CMG’s stations remain in Spectrum’s lineup with local news, entertainment and sports.

Sometimes in Washington the best indicator that something big is brewing is when suddenly everyone clams up. Such is the case with the long simmering effort to impose retransmission consent regulations on streaming video carriage of local stations. Recent sub rosa negotiations are not very well hidden, since affiliate groups and lobbyists (including the NAB) have submitted ex parte filings about their FCC meetings on the topic. Both FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel and NAB President Curtis LeGeyt have acknowledged that decisions are overdue on streaming retransmission policies for video via virtual multichannel video programming distributors.

Dish has sent the FCC a term sheet it says backs up the claim, cited in a story in Broadcasting + Cable, that Cox Media Group wanted to include both Standard General and Tegna stations in retrans talks. Standard General is trying to get the FCC to sign off on its $8 billion-plus deal to acquire the Tegna stations. It has told the FCC it will not bundle Cox and Tegna stations in retrans talks and Cox has disputed the Dish claim, saying it never has and never will try to do so.

Comcast and Standard General have struck an agreement confirming Standard General’s pledge to the FCC that it would agree not to raise the retransmission consent rates of Tegna stations charged to MVPDs to that of its Cox Media Group TV stations — if applicable — after the closing of its deal to buy those Tegna stations. That is according to Standard General, which said the agreement on not raising the rates was reached this week with Comcast, which is the largest cable group carrying Tegna stations.

American  American Television Alliance (ATVA) issued a statement criticizing retransmission consent negotiating tactics by Apollo Global Management-owned Cox Media Group. Citing examples of what it called blackouts and threats of blackouts this holiday season, the ATVA said that those disruptions highlight why Standard General’s proposed $8.6 billion acquisition of Tegna poses a “significant threat to consumers”.

Comcast Corp. and Nexstar Media Group reached an agreement over the weekend that prevented millions of Xfinity pay TV customers from losing dozens of Nexstar-owned local stations. The agreement comes after Comcast was forced to pull at least one Nexstar-controlled station — WPIX (ch. 11, CW) in New York City — and warned that it might have to drop more if a new contract could not be reached by mid-December.

Things keep getting messier between Comcast and Nexstar, with the cable operator filing a complaint at the FCC late Monday alleging that Nexstar and Mission have failed to negotiate retransmission consent in good faith. It comes as the cable operator faces the possibility of losing more than 90 Nexstar stations this weekend.

She tells lawmakers she “welcomes” the chance to better protect consumers from blackouts. She expressed her view in a letter to Rhode Island’s congressional delegation, whose members had pushed the FCC to do everything it could to help resolve a retrans dispute — since resolved — between Nexstar Media Group and Verizon Communications affecting WPRI Providence.

With media companies prioritizing streaming, the pressure to raise programming fees on affiliates appears to be easing, according to Sinclair Broadcast Group CEO Chris Ripley. On the company’s third-quarter earnings call with analysts and investors Wednesday morning, Ripley said “there has been a shift in terms of negotiating position” as networks have moved some of their best content to streaming.

In the midst of a retransmission fee dispute with DirecTV, Mission Broadcasting has prepared letters for its station general managers to send to government officials blaming an intractable satellite company for the blackout impacting their constituents.

Nexstar Media Group said it reached an new retransmission consent agreement with Verizon Fios, ending a two week blackout. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The dispute affected more than 3 million subscribers in 10 markets, according to Nexstar.