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Deadline, TVWeek

For CBS, One Carriage Negotiation Ends Successfully While Another One Remains at an Impasse

Jul 29, 2019  •  Post A Comment

CBS, which has been trying to reach carriage deals with AT&T and Altice USA, succeeded in coming to terms on a deal with Altice. Meanwhile, the impasse with AT&T, which has resulted in CBS stations being blacked out on DirecTV, DirecTV Now and U-verse cable systems, is now in its second week.

The Altice deal “covers retransmission consent for CBS-owned stations and the carriage of Showtime, CBS Sports Network, Pop TV and Smithsonian Channel on the Optimum and Suddenlink cable systems run by Altice,” Deadline reports. “Financial terms were not disclosed.”

Deadline adds: “Under the deal, Altice will also be able to continue offering the Showtime digital streaming service to its broadband customers. That option has been a sticking point in relations with AT&T, whose request to offer CBS All Access in the manner that Amazon and Roku do has been rebuffed.”

In a statement that appeared to contrast the relatively smooth Altice negotiations with the challenging AT&T situation, Ray Hopkins, president of Television Networks Distribution for CBS Corp., said: “We are pleased to strike a fair marketplace deal with Altice for CBS, Showtime, CBS Sports Network, Pop TV and Smithsonian Channel well in advance of our expiration and without any disruption to consumers. We appreciate the value Altice places on delivering America’s #1 network to its customers. Altice is a great partner, and we look forward to continuing to bring our highly rated programming and exclusive major sporting events to all of Altice’s customers.”

Yossi Benchetrit, head of programming for Altice USA, also commented on the CBS deal, saying: “Altice USA is committed to delivering a wide array of high-quality content for our customers at competitive, fair rates, and this new agreement with CBS allows us to meet that objective. We are pleased to extend our longstanding partnership with CBS, enabling the CBS network portfolio to remain available to our customers as part of Altice’s Optimum and Suddenlink TV lineups.”

2 Comments

  1. It is hard to understand why CBS doesn’t want to offer CBS All-Access to more people. Especially since their audience skews older and that is a group that isn’t doing a lot of streaming yet.

  2. More people are going to discover they can get the networks, with a better signal, over the air via antenna. These re-transmission fights may cause more cord cutting.

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