Retransmission consent dispute

The Allbritton ABC affiliate in Washington says it had reached a retrans deal when the cable company replaced the station for an out-of-market affiliate.

Dish Network customers in Central Wyoming, can no longer view Casper network affiliates KTWO (ABC), KGWC (CBS) and KFNB (Fox). The carriage deal between these stations and Dish expired on Jan. 1.

Negotiations over fees paid by cable and satellite distributors to TV stations were largely successful, but in New York a dispute led to a blackout of the sports channel MSG.

The broadcasters says it hasn’t been able to agree to terms with Time Warner Cable for carriage of WCTI and WFXI-WYDO, as the Dec. 31 deadline nears.

The Media General NBC affiliate posted a notice on its website and on-screen crawl asking customers to contact Verizon before the retransmission consent contract expires at 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 31. Negotions are continuing.

Allbritton Communications’ ABC affiliate in Charleston, S.C., says it hasn’t reached a retransmission consent deal with Time Warner Cable and AT&T U-verse, so after Dec. 31 the station will not be carried by their systems.

An impasse between Time Warner Cable and Cordillera Communications’ KRIS over retransmission consent threatens to leave 80,000 cable customers without four signals — KRIS (NBC and CW), KAJA (Telemundo) and KDF, a low-power independent — if a deal isn’t reached by 11:59 p.m. Monday.

With its retransmission-consent agreements with several cable MSOs set to expire on Dec. 31, TV stations owned by Hearst Television are beginning to warn viewers in the Sacramento, Calif., area that they could soon lose local programming.

The three-year contract that allows Insight Communications to carry Sinclair Broadcast Group’s Fox affiliate WDKY Lexington, Ky., as part of its cable packages is up at the end of the year, and Sinclair says it expects a new deal won’t be reached in time.

As of 6 p.m. ET Wednesday, LIN stations were off the air in Eastern and Central timezone Mediacom markets because the MSO and broadcaster’s retrans pact had expired. One exception is WVBT and WAVY in the Norfolk-Portsmouth-Newport News, Va., market, where an extension was granted until Sept. 7 because of Hurricane Irene.

Univision programming is being restored to 7,000 households around Rhode Island’s East Bay. Full Channel TV said that it cut a deal with the Spanish-language network after a three-month stand-off between it and Entravision’s WUNI Boston.

Nine stations in five markets in the Northeast and Southern portions of the U.S. could go dark on March 31.

LIN Media and Dish Network failed to reach a retransmission consent deal prior to Friday midnight deadline, resulting in loss of 27 LIN stations in 17 markets. “LIN Media is simply being greedy,” says Dish in a statement.

Retrans fee impasse leads the owner of 27 stations to say it’s ready to pull them from the satellite provider at midnight on Friday.

Satellite television provider Dish Network Corp. posted deeper-than-expected subscriber losses for the fourth quarter as many customers canceled service after a dispute with Fox Network in October blacked out sports programs.

Full Channel TV said it decided to stop carrying Spanish-language WUNI Boston after its owner, Entravision, increased its retransmission fees by 33%.

Cablevision Systems shed about 35,000 basic video customers in the fourth quarter, losses that are almost entirely attributed to the MSO’s high-profile retransmission consent battle with Fox Broadcasting last year.

Utica Mayor David Roefaro says constituents call his office daily, upset and confused by the substitution of news out of Pennsylvania for their local news. He says that Time Warner’s franchise agreement with the city is up, and that renewal of the agreement is not a given. “Unless I can assure my residents that they will receive their local news and not Pennsylvania’s, I’m going to be in contact with other signal providers,” says the mayor.

Time Warner Cable announced Friday evening that it reached an extension with Sinclair Broadcasting “that will allow our customers to continue to receive all Sinclair Broadcasting stations uninterrupted through Jan. 14 and allow us to continue negotiating to reach a long-term agreement. We thank our customers for their patience and support throughout these negotiations.”

Comcast-owned cable channels E! and Style released a statement on Thursday indicating that they could have their signals pulled off of Dish Network after Friday, when their current carriage deal with the satellite service expires.

Time Warner Cable says it is continuing to negotiate a new retrans deal, but if talks are unsuccessful by the Dec. 31 deadline and Sinclair pulls its stations, the cable operator will offer programming from the Big 4 networks.

The broadcaster wants the commission to forbid Time Warner Cable from using its stations as substitute network programming in the cable operator’s retransmission consent battle with Smith Media.

The group owner says talks have broken down after Time Warner Cable turned down a retrans fee of 10 cents per sub and didn’t make a counter offer. TWC says that’s not true and that it remains “open and willing to negotiate a reasonable agreement for our customers and have no intention of declaring negotiations to be at an end even in the event that Sinclair decides to pull their signals from Time Warner Cable on Dec. 31.”

With the fate of millions of Time Warner Cable’s TV subscribers in the balance, the Sinclair station group said TWC has nixed a proposal to settle the parties’ differences through binding arbitration. The two are negotiating how much TWC will pay Sinclair to carry stations covering the slew of TWC customers.

The looming retransmission consent battle between Time Warner Cable and Sinclair Broadcast Group appears to be showing signs of positive movement, with both sides raising the possibility of arbitration to settle the dispute.

Retransmission consent negotiations may never be the same. A deal struck last January between Time Warner Cable and News Corp. included a precedent-setting condition to allow TWC to carry Fox’s network programming if retransmission negotiations with Fox affiliates break down. Many TV execs likened Fox’s move to throwing its non-owned Fox affiliates under the bus.

Time Warner Cable is telling local subscribers in Buffalo, N.Y., that it will continue to carry Fox network programs into January and beyond, even if its deal with Sinclair’s WUTV, the local Fox affiliate, expires and the station is dropped from the local cable system.

If the government injects itself into the “private business negotiations of retrans,” says NAB President Gordon Smith, it could ultimately mean the flight of the Super Bowl from free TV.

Just weeks after News Corp. and Cablevision agreed to terms after a bitter negotiation over program retransmission fees that cut the cable company’s subscribers off from the NFL, the World Series, Glee and other Fox network fare, News Corp. COO Chase Carey set the stage for significantly higher payments from cable operators in the future.

Sen. John Kerry held a “thoughtful dialog” on the retransmission consent regime at the Nov. 17 hearing on the issue. By the end, he advised the participants to try to find a way to negotiate those deals that would not result in consumer dislocations. He suggested that if such a solution is not found, the dialog would become government action.

News Corp. President Chase Carey will testify to Congress that government changes to the retransmission consent law “would clearly tip the balance of negotiations toward distributors. If broadcasters aren’t able to negotiate on a level playing field for a fair carriage rate then we would be relegated to second class status, and our future viability would be threatened.”

Cable companies and other advocates of retransmission reform cranked up the lobby machine Monday with a column from former Rep. Jack Fields, one of the sponsors of the 1992 law that established the current retransmission rules, and a lobbyist with the cable TV industry.

Cablevision Systems COO Tom Rutledge wouldn’t discuss Thursday how many subscribers the cable company likely lost due to its recent public program showdown with News Corp./Fox, which kept key programmers off its cable systems for two weeks. But on Cablevision’s quarterly earnings conference call, he defended the company’s stance against Fox and its hopes for government intervention.

Another week has gone by, and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has yet to step into the middle of the bitter Fox-Cablevision retrans feud. Good for him. ~~ Cablevision seems to have lost its mind with some of its tactics. ~~ It’s funny that neither side is spending more time encouraging consumers to put up antennas. ~~ Fox’s hard line shows the driving determination to get paid for its programming and I’ll bet that later Fox affils will be trying hard to hang on to their own retrans dollars when affiliation renewals contracts come up. ~~ Broadcasters may start to feel an unexpected retrabs backlash as cable operators begin to challenge the legality of duopolies.

The Cablevision blackout led to slashed ratings in New York for Fox drama Glee this week, with the Halloween-themed hour down 29% compared to the previous original episode. On Tuesday on WNYW, Glee posted a 2.84 in the 18-to-49 demo, down 29% from a 4.01 on Oct. 12. Nationally, ratings were up 4% in the key demo. With WNYW off the air in 43% of the New York market, its late local news continues to suffer ratings drops at much higher percentages than that.

Fox on Wednesday rejected a last-ditch offer from Cablevision Systems Corp. to pay it more for its TV stations’ signals, a move that could leave some 3 million Cablevision subscribers in the New York area with few options besides heading to a bar to watch baseball’s World Series on TV.