How does Dish usually deal with recalcitrant locals?

[Stacy A]

For some strange reason, our local ABC affiliate KTBS out of the Shreveport, LA market demanded from Dish Network a nearly 300% increase for Dish to carry their signal on the locals. According to Dish, that's a penny per subscriber, per day. Apparently all the other stations inked the usual deal with Dish - they are still on the air. However, Dish quit broadcasting KTBS's signal on New years day and they are a running a short clip of Charlie Ergen talking about how unreasonable KTBS is being. They are broadcasting the e-mail and number of the station manager as well as a list of local advertisers on KTBS and the phone numbers for them. Charlie is playing hardball with them, and I have no problem with that. I just don't understand why this one station is holding out. I don't thin they will get anywhere. My question is, has anyone seen this done before, and, does the station usually cave? The only dog I have in this fight is that since Dish quit carrying the signal, I no longer get the guide info for the OTA digital tuner. So far, my timers are still working with the 622.

 

[tsduke]

Yup. Went through it last year on cable. Sinclair and Mediacom couldn't reach an agreement and Mediacom had to pull some stations. Most affected was Fox in Des Moines and CBS in Cedar Rapids. There were others but these 2 represent the most customers.

Mediacom folded in in the end. Turned it back on the Friday before the Super Bowl.

Edit: In fact E* went through similar dispute with Sinclair a few years back too. Hopefully with E* being much bigger the Mediacom it will work out better for you.

 

[Cegarrett]

Hi Stacy,
I'm also in the Shreveport DMA and am having the same problem. However I'm finding that the One timer that I have is still showing the correct times and Dates when i look at the schedule under the timer. (go tho your list of timers and select the one you want to look at and it shows all of the scheduled dates & times) I'm using this to set manual timers off of my OTA and it seems to be working O.K.

HTH,
Chris

 

[Stacy A]

I'm not having any problems with my timers continuing to fire. I figured it would be a problem due to NBR, since there is no "name" in the guide anymore. However, Desperate Housewives recorded just fine on Sunday night and Dirty Sexy Money is still scheduled. The good thing for me is that I also get Tyler/Longview locals, since I live right in between the two, so I can just turn my antenna towards the west and pick up all their channels - and get the guide data from Dish as well from there.

I just can't imagine that KTBS really thinks that they could win this. I could see it if they had teamed up with KSLA (CBS) and both held out. That would have generated a problem. I do know of one person who has said he will switch to D* over this, because he completely misunderstood what was reported on the local news about the situation. He thought they meant that ALL the locals were going away - not just KTBS. He assumed Dish was the one being the jack donkey.

 

[dlsnyder]

What they usually do in situations like this (and it seems to happen pretty often with Dish) is they will credit you $1.00 a month on your bill for the missing local channel. If the dispute lasts more than a month be sure to call customer service and ask about it.

 

[digiblur]

For some strange reason, our local ABC affiliate KTBS out of the Shreveport, LA market demanded from Dish Network a nearly 300% increase for Dish to carry their signal on the locals. According to Dish, that's a penny per subscriber, per day. Apparently all the other stations inked the usual deal with Dish - they are still on the air. However, Dish quit broadcasting KTBS's signal on New years day and they are a running a short clip of Charlie Ergen talking about how unreasonable KTBS is being. They are broadcasting the e-mail and number of the station manager as well as a list of local advertisers on KTBS and the phone numbers for them. Charlie is playing hardball with them, and I have no problem with that. I just don't understand why this one station is holding out. I don't thin they will get anywhere. My question is, has anyone seen this done before, and, does the station usually cave? The only dog I have in this fight is that since Dish quit carrying the signal, I no longer get the guide info for the OTA digital tuner. So far, my timers are still working with the 622.

I thought it was the station saying it was a penny day, not Dish.

Can you grab them with an OTA antenna?

 

[Stacy A]

Apparently the station wants Dish to pay them one cent per day per subscriber (to the Shreveport locals, of course) and this represents nearly a 300% increase in what Dish had been paying for their signal (according to Dish, which can be pretty creative in their perceptions).

And yes, I can and do grab them with an OTA antenna. I only subscribe to the locals to get the guide data and to have in case the station's digital signal goes dark - which used to happen fairly frequently in their early days of digital broadcasting. The PQ of Standard Def locals over Dish is terrible. It's a highly compressed, grainy, ugly picture. But it's better than no picture, when the station can't keep a digital signal up.

 

[digiblur]

I'll be honest I'm hearing conflicting stories from both sides of the table... do I believe either side? Not for a second!

 

[butzchan]

I disagree on this one. Local channels are carried without extra charge by cable companies and D* in a lot of markets (and in my market-Cincinnati). Dish is getting away with what the cable companies are trying to do with sports channels like Big10 Network....create a special package and charge more for it. This is probably the main reason why Dish does not have HD locals in a lot of markets.

 

[tempVAdish]

I don't see why stations do this, we had the same issue a while back w/ our local fox station threatening to make dish pull it. they make no money off of the free OTA signal, & all the sats do is serve as a 'repeater' to get their signal to people who live outside the OTA or cable services. Seems like the locals should be greatful to get the better coverage.

[end rant]

Rob

 

[mike123abc]

Dish was probably paying 10 cents per month and the station wants 30 cents now. They will probably compromise eventually.

 

[dlsnyder]

Either that or they were asking for a penny a day for every subscriber Dish Network has nationwide, kind of like the terms YES reportedly were asking. Who knows in these things?

 

[DishSubLA]

I disagree on this one. Local channels are carried without extra charge by cable companies and D* in a lot of markets (and in my market-Cincinnati). Dish is getting away with what the cable companies are trying to do with sports channels like Big10 Network....create a special package and charge more for it. This is probably the main reason why Dish does not have HD locals in a lot of markets.

Stations being carried for no charge to satellite is ONLY if that station wants to be carried under the Must Carry rule. Usually these are the smallest of stations who couldn't hope to get much money from satellite (or negotiated as part of carrying the media company's other "cable" channels). Many stations choose to negotiate with satellite because those stations see it as an opportunity to make some dough. Usually the network affiliated stations choose negotiation because they feel they have a valuable product and want as much money for it as possible. If satellite and stations cannot reach an agreement, then satellite has the right NOT to carry that station. So, in fact, there really is a cost to satellite companies for providing these channels, certainly with maintaining the antennas for OTA in that DMA and encoders at uplink. I believe local stations pay the cost of of fiber optic and encoders to the uplink. Oh, and by the way, the current and digital licenses that the brodcasters have are a FREE gift of our government to the broadcasters, and now they are making more money by charging cable/satellite for carriage rights! One would think that all US citizens should get a check as our share of what a broadcasters charge satellite.

IMHO, it should be law that cable and satellite should be allowed to carry any and all local broadcast channels as LIL without charge from the broadcaster and without charge from satellite/cable as these broadcast licenses are still OWNED by the U.S. public and we merely grant our permission to media companies to broadcast on our public airwaves. Therefore, we have a right to unlimited and unfettered access to our local channels regardless of platform.

 

[Van]

I disagree on this one. Local channels are carried without extra charge by cable companies and D* in a lot of markets (and in my market-Cincinnati). Dish is getting away with what the cable companies are trying to do with sports channels like Big10 Network....create a special package and charge more for it. This is probably the main reason why Dish does not have HD locals in a lot of markets.

Outside of the must carry law your totally wrong and all you have to do is call your local cable companies and ask them for the basic basic package of locals only and you'll get a price of $10 - $15 for most of them. The cost is blended in to all the packages wether its on cable, satellite dbs, or fios.