More than 150 local TV stations owned by Nexstar Media Group went dark on DirecTV‘s platform as of 4 p.m. PT Sunday after the sides failed to come to terms on a new retransmission consent agreement.
The blackout includes Nexstar stations in Los Angeles (KTLA) and Chicago (WGN) and also Nexstar’s NewsNation channel. In total, 159 station serving 113 markets went dark after a last push of negotiations in late June.
DirecTV serves about 12.7 million subscribers across the U.S. Nexstar said it offered to extend the current deal to Oct. 31 to allow contract talks to continue. Nexstar indicated that the blackout affects at least 10 million subscribers across DirecTV’s footprint. DirecTV accused Nexstar of seeking unrealistic increases in the fees DirecTV pays Nexstar to carry its local stations on a market-by-market basis.
“Nexstar remains hopeful that a resolution can be reached quickly to return to viewers their favorite network programming, live sporting events, in-depth local news, and other local content relevant to their communities, as well as critical emergency updates for which DirecTV is charging its subscribers,” Nexstar said.
“Nexstar has a long track record of forcing programming outages in an effort to unnecessarily raise prices for everyone at the expense of the communities they are licensed and entrusted to serve,” said Rob Thun, chief content officer of DirecTV. “We will continue to work with Nexstar to reach an agreement and will take all necessary actions to provide our customers access to their favorite programming while protecting them from unwarranted price increases.”
KTLA Los Angeles is among the Nexstar stations that have aired a crawl alert during news broadcasts warning DirecTV subscribers that the station might come down.
“Nexstar has been negotiating tirelessly and in good faith in an attempt to reach a mutually agreeable multi-year contract with DirecTV since May, offering the same fair market rates it offered to other distribution partners with whom it completed successful negotiations in the past year,” Nexstar said. “Nexstar routinely reaches amicable retransmission and carriage agreements with its cable, satellite, and telco partners — in the last three years alone, the company has successfully completed agreements with more than 500 distribution partners.”
DirecTV is coming back at Nexstar hard in federal court and at the FCC, accusing the broadcast giant of using loopholes to get around the Federal Communication Commission’s limits on the number of TV stations that a single entity can own. DirecTV’s lengthy statement on the Nexstar blackout also points to Nexstar’s business relationship with Mission Broadcasting and White Knight Broadcasting. Both are small outfits that set deals with Nexstar when the company had to divest stations to comply with FCC ownership limits in order to complete its $4 billion acquisition of Tribune Broadcasting.
“Nexstar has additionally been withholding 27 stations that it controls but does not own from Mission and White Knight Broadcasting across 23 of these very same metro areas from DirecTV, DirecTV Stream, and U-verse homes since mid-October of last year. On March 15 DirecTV filed an antitrust suit in federal court, and on June 30 DirecTV filed a legal complaint with the FCC, describing how Nexstar and its sham sidecars are conspiring to manipulate the cost of retransmission consent to American consumers,” DirecTV said.
In its statement, DirecTV also stated that negotiations with Nexstar are ongoing despite the blackout.
Carriage battles between TV station groups and the largest cable system operators and satcasters DirecTV and Dish Network have been a staple for the media business during the past three decades. But in recent years, with the industry’s shift to direct-to-consumer streaming platforms, the temperature has come down in those talks. Nexstar and DirecTV is the first flare-up between large-scale players in a few years. DirecTV is still a formidable player in the pay TV distribution, although its subscriber base, which was once upward of 20 million in the U.S., has been hit hard by cord cutting.
