Hearst-DISH Join Growing List of Outages as NFL Season Begins

Hearst Television and DISH Network have joined a growing list of high-profile carriage disputes as the NFL season begins.

Hearst stations were no longer seen on DISH’s satellite lineup beginning Friday, Sept. 8. As with other disputes, Hearst says DISH is not willing to pay a fair market rate to resell its programming while DISH says Hearst is asking for too much.

The outage affects 37 channels in 27 markets, including CBS affiliate KCCI/8 (Des Moines) and ABC affiliates KETV/7 (Omaha) and WISN-TV/12 (Milwaukee).

The dispute meant there were ten Upper Midwest markets with at least one dispute underway in early September:

• Nexstar stations had been off DirecTV since July and returned on Sept. 18.
• The Nexstar-managed FOX affiliate in the Quad Cities is off both satellite providers.
• Disney-owned properties parted ways with Spectrum Cable (formerly known as Charter) on Aug. 31. They returned Sept. 11, two days after this item was originally posted. The outage affected channels including ESPN and owned-and-operated ABC affiliates, none of which is in the Upper Midwest.

Multiple stations and providers in some markets were involved in disputes, so if a DISH Network customer in Des Moines switched to DirecTV because of the CBS outage, they’d would have lost NBC until the Nexstar-DirecTV dispute ended.

Federal law allows broadcast stations to opt for retransmission consent, which means cable and satellite providers cannot carry their programming without an agreement.

Terms of such agreements are not publicly released but involve a specific amount of compensation per customer to the station. Some providers have started a practice of adding a separate local channel surcharge on bills to point out the cost to customers, though they do not also break out the cost of carrying other channels.

The disputes also have a ripple effect on bars, restaurants, and hotels that rely on the providers to deliver programming to their customers.

It reaches places you wouldn’t expect, like the KOA Campground in Belvidere, SD. The campground uses DirecTV to provide a small channel lineup to its RV and cabin customers, but I found on a summer stay that it was missing CBS amid the Nexstar-DirecTV dispute.

This item was originally posted on Sept. 9 and was updated on Sept. 11 and Sept. 18 to reflect other disputes ending.

SEE MORE in the Retransmission Consent category

Disclosure: Jon Ellis is an employee of Gray Media Group. The statements and views expressed in this posting are his own and do not reflect those of Gray Media Group.