DIRECTV Loses Rights to Over 200 Nexstar Local Channels in Increasingly Bitter Retransmission Fee Disupte
And just like that, viewers in over 100 markets across the country have lost access to more than 200 local stations as Nexstar, the country’s largest local station owner, and DIRECTV have come to an impasse. On Sunday evening, DIRECTV, DIRECTV STREAM, and U-verse subscribers lost their Nexstar-owned ABC, CBS, CW, FOX, NBC, and NewsNation stations due to a particularly bitter carriage dispute.
Last week, DIRECTV released a statement indicating that the outage was imminent and blamed Nexstar for demanding double the station group’s previous fee for carrying the channels. On Sunday, DIRECTV followed up, saying that this was the seventh time in less than a year that Nexstar has either threatened to remove channels from a cable or satellite provider or followed through leading to their stations being blacked out on certain platforms.
“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,” DIRECTV chief content officer Rob Thun said. “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.”
In addition to blaming Nexstar for the channel disruption, DIRECTV is also accusing the station owner of using underhanded practices to work around rules against monopolies. The satellite and streaming company claims that Nexstar is manipulating loopholes in order to allow it to “exceed the 39% national ownership cap” while also forcing 27 channels that it manages, but does not own, to remain dark on DIRECTV platforms dating back to October 2022. The dispute over of these Mission and White Knight Broadcasting channels in 23 markets resulted in DIRECTV filing suit against Nexstar in March.
For its part, the station group places the blame solely at the feet of DIRECTV, claiming that the company declined to extend the current deal for another four months, despite the fact that numerous other cable and streaming companies have been able to come to an agreement with the company in recent months.
“DIRECTV and Nexstar were unable to reach a new distribution agreement allowing the [sic] DIRECTV the right to continue airing the highly-rated programming on Nexstar’s local stations,” a statement from the company said. “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.”
Since the start of the year, Nexstar has reached a new retransmission agreement with Hulu + Live TV, as well as placed local channels in numerous markets on YouTube TV, thanks to an agreement initially announced in March.
Both sides say that they are willing to continue to negotiate, but Nexstar is warning customers that the disagreement could result in them losing the ability to watch next week’s MLB All-Star Game, the upcoming Women’s World Cup, and even potentially NFL and college football if this drags on until fall. The company also warns that this could prevent customers from watching critical local news and weather reports during hurricane, tornado, and wildfire season. In a statement, DIRECTV advised subscribers to turn to the other news, sports, and entertainment channels available on the platform, as well as streaming services and over-the-air channels, to fill in the gaps.
While the very public dispute appears to be increasingly contentious, it is in both sides’ best interest to reach a resolution. However, if that happens, it will almost certainly mean that DIRECTV will be forced to pay more for Nexstar’s 200 channels than it already was, which eventually — and inevitably — will mean a higher monthly bill for customers.
DIRECTV STREAM
DIRECTV STREAM is a live TV streaming service, which is essentially the streaming version of the DIRECTV service. All packages include local channels and at least 31 of the top 35 cable channels. New subscribers can get a free Gemini streaming device from the company, in which case the service is called “DIRECTV via Internet.”