By law, Dish on January 12 blocked its customers from receiving The CW Network in Louisville, WDRB-41 and WBKI-TV; NBC affiliate WAND-TV in Decatur, Ill.; and all four network affiliates serving tiny Lima, Ohio.
It was the latest retransmission fee impasse to surface in recent years. Now, it has ended. But, there’s chatter that another carriage dispute has just been resolved, hours before a “blackout” by law was to take place.
Block Communications on Friday evening (1/21) moved forward with the signing of a new retrans agreement with Dish.
The decision ended an eight-day “blackout” of Dish’s stations across all Dish local lineups in the impacted markets.
Block did not comment on the dispute when informing its viewers of the agreement through the WDRB website.
While Block’s stations are back, TEGNA-owned properties remain off of Dish. The battle between the company formerly known as Gannett and the DBS provider has been particularly ugly, with TEGNA’s station absent from Dish local lineups since October 6, 2021. Less than two weeks later, DISH filed a “bad faith” complaint against TEGNA, in which it assailed TEGNA’s “bad faith actions during negotiations,” including what Dish claims is a “demand” from TEGNA that Dish pay for all subscribers in a local market whether they purchase local programming from Dish or not.
In November 2021, TEGNA filed a cross-complaint against Dish with the FCC for what it says is “its failure to comply” with the Commission’s “Good Faith” rules.
As those parties battle, Dish was working to avoid blocking access to 12 stations owned by Morgan Murphy Media from its subscribers as soon as Monday evening (1/24). Negotiations, as have been the case over the course of several years, appeared to have difficult once again. However, a resolution appears to be in place.
As reported by TVAnswerMan, an industry blog, the company’s TV station websites over the weekend posted a story alerting viewers who subscribed to Dish that signal loss was coming if a new deal was not signed by 7pm Eastern on Monday.
“The WISC-TV carriage agreement with DISH expires at (7 p.m. ET) Monday, January 24. While we wish to avoid a disruption in your DISH service, without an agreement or extension, DISH could choose to remove our programming from its lineup,” a post on the WISC-3 in Madison, Wisc., website read.
By Monday afternoon, the webpage was no longer active, signaling the possible signing of a new accord; RBR+TVBR‘s call to WISC for confirmation was not immediately returned.
The apparent new agreement guarantees the TV station owner and the DBS provider won’t be repeating the ugly events of summer 2015. At that time, Morgan Murphy sought the FCC’s help in gaining a new Dish deal, slamming the satellite company for their inability to reach a new retrans accord.
A one-day “blackout” was seen in 2012. Another dispute was seen in August 2018.
