With the end of the World Cup approaching and the start of football season coming up in August, DirecTV and E.W. Scripps have announced a new multi-year agreement that will return 54 local broadcast stations owned and operated by the station group to DirecTV’s streaming, satellite, and U-verse customers.
The agreement ends a five-week blackout affecting millions of customers across 36 Nielsen DMAs, including Baltimore, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Milwaukee, Nashville, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Tampa-St. Petersburg, and others.
While the agreement ends the dispute, DirecTV continued to criticize the process of negotiating new retransmission consent agreements with station groups.
“[W]e are frustrated that broadcasters use blackouts as a tool to force us to accept unwarranted rate hikes that consistently exceed normal, inflationary increases, and by a lot,” said Rob Thun, chief content officer at DirecTV. “At a time when affordability matters more than ever, families are too often asked to pay more while receiving less…[A]s ownership becomes concentrated among a handful of ever-larger broadcasters gaining stations across new and within their existing markets, those expanded stations become increasingly powerful and further unbalanced negotiating tools. The more markets and major network affiliations a broadcaster controls, the greater its ability to withhold programming from the very communities it is meant to serve.”
“Consumers should never lose access to essential local television because of a carriage dispute,” he added. “It’s time to modernize the system so it rewards service to local communities—and not consolidated market power—by returning to the original purpose of broadcasting of putting viewers’ interests first.”
Separately, DirecTV is part of an antitrust lawsuit in California seeking to block the Nexstar/Tegna merger that would further consolidate the industry.
Broadcasters have long argued that consolidation is necessary to help them compete with big tech companies who already dominate the ad and streaming businesses.
