Inc., blacked out Dish customers’ access Friday to 46 local television stations in 38 markets across 33 states and the District of Columbia, including WGRZ. The carriage terms in place expired at the end of September but the two parties agreed to extensions which expired October 10th.
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In a statement, Dish SVP Warren Schlichting slammed the move.
Dish said it has offered an extension to the current contract that would leave the programming on and include a provision for new rates to be applied retroactively. But Tegna, instead, chose to turn their back on their public interest obligations & use innocent consumers for bargaining chips.
Tegna was similarly firm.
While the blackout has been lifted, it is the same old situation Dish Network customers have had to deal with, just with Tegna this time.
DISH said it had had been making steady progress with TEGNA in recent negotiations, and was hopeful that they would come to a mutual agreement to renew carriage of the TEGNA local stations.
Tegna, which is based in McLean, Virginia, said that Dish routinely dropped valued cable & broadcast channels & said that it was a serial channel dropper. On Sunday, the two sides said they reached a multi-year agreement, but did not provide further details. “This extension ensures that critical programming remains available to all viewers”. Tegna is one of the biggest independent station groups of major affiliates in the top twenty-five markets and reaches around a third of all the TV households around the world as per the website.
Undoubtedly, the fact that National Football League games are scheduled to air Sunday on Tegna’s Fox, CBS and NBC affiliate stations helped add urgency to the negotiations.
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The Tegna stations are located in such large markets as Washington, D.C., Phoenix, Seattle, Denver and Atlanta.
