Posted by Community on November 05, 2010 at 12:08:21:
October 29, 2010
Dish Network and News Corp. announced an agreement on carriage fees Friday. This averted removal of Fox-owned broadcast stations from the satellite service. It also restored cable channels FX, National Geographic Channel and 19 Fox regional sports networks that were taken off Dish four weeks earlier as negotiations dragged on.
Dish's contract to carry the cable channels had expired at the end of September. Its contract to carry Fox-owned broadcast stations such as Chicago's WFLD-Ch. 32 and WPWR-Ch. 50 was set to expire at the end of this month, which put Dish subscribers at risk of losing World Series baseball, Chicago Bears football and shows such as "Glee," "House" and "Family Guy" as of Monday.
“After prolonged negotiations to reach a fair deal, we’re pleased to enter into a long-term agreement with Fox and to assure our customers that they can continue to enjoy these channels,” Dave Shull, senior vice president of programming for Dish Network, said in the announcement.
Shull earlier had accused Fox of "a long history of trying to shake down pay-TV providers, including Cablevision (and) Time Warner," and said Dish subscribers are "already burdened enough in this challenging economy" and "should not be held hostage" to fund Fox's acquisition of expensive TV sports rights packages.
Dish is the third-largest video distributor in the nation, serving 14.3 million households. That includes roughly 360,000 homes in the Chicago area, or about 10 percent of the market, according to an industry source, although the specific figure is tightly held and considered proprietary.
These standoffs are increasingly common, as media companies that provide content, such as News Corp., seek to ensure revenue even in slack advertising markets through the negotiated per-customer fees they are paid by cable and satellite service providers.
Daily Variety reported this week, for example, that DirecTV may drop the Comcast-owned channel G4 at least temporarily as soon as Monday, when its carriage agreement expires, pending negotiations on a new deal. Hockey fans may recall DirecTV dropped Comcast-owned Versus for almost six months until an agreement on per-subscriber fees finally was reached in March in time for the start of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
"I want to thank our partners at Dish Network who worked tirelessly to help us reach a successful conclusion,” Mike Hopkins, president of Fox Networks affiliate sales and marketing, said in a statement. “This agreement provides a strategic partnership between Fox and Dish to bring the best programming to Dish."
Despite the Dish agreement, News Corp's standoff continues with New York-based Cablevision over retransmision fees. That dispute has taken Fox Broadcasting programming off the cable services reaching more than 3 million people in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey.