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Fox Settles Retrans Dispute With Dish After a Month; Now More Pressure on Fox and Cablevision to Settle Their Dispute

Oct 29, 2010  •  Post A Comment

"Roughly two days before its retransmission consent agreement for more than two dozen Fox Networks owned and operated stations were set to expire, Dish Network has reached a carriage deal that not only avoids a blackout of the broadcast networks, but restores more than 20 cable channels that have been dark on the satellite giant for nearly one month." So writes Mike Farrell in Mutlichannel News.

While reports said terms of the deal were not disclosed, Meg James of the Los Angeles Times wrote , "The comprehensive agreement included higher payments for the signals of Fox’s local television stations, including KTTV-TV Channel 11 and KCOP-TV Channel 13 in Los Angeles, according to people familiar with the terms."

James also wrote, "The main hang-up during the stalemate was over payments for the sports channels and whether Dish would make them available to all of its subscribers. Satellite and cable operators pay Fox as much as $4 a month per subscriber for its sports channels, more than four times the cost of a general entertainment channel such as TNT. In its public campaign, Dish tried to paint Fox as a greedy "global media cartel" out to gouge consumers.While Fox fell short in its bid to get wider distribution on Dish for its sports channels, it succeeded in wrangling higher payments for all its channels."

The deal also increases pressure for Fox and Cablevision to settle their retransmission dispute. Wrote Brian Stelter in The New York Times, "Using the Dish agreement to add pressure to Cablevision and Fox, Julius Genachowski, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, released a statement Friday urging the two parties ‘to complete their negotiations and end the impasse that has disrupted service to viewers.’ "

Stelter also notes the pressure for Congress to do something about these restrans disputes: "Separately, Mr. Genachowski wrote in a letter to Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, who recently proposed updated legislation, that ‘it is time for Congress to revisit the current retransmission law.’ "

One Comment

  1. I have Dish Network and didn’t miss having Fox at all.

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