At 2:30pm Eastern on Saturday — mere hours to game time — DirecTV and TEGNA agreed to a multi-year distribution agreement covering the broadcast television station owner’s 64 stations in 51 Nielsen designated markets.
All stations and programming returned to DIRECTV, DIRECTV STREAM and U-verse customers over the next several hours, and just in time for a key NFL playoff match.
”DIRECTV and TEGNA greatly appreciate the patience of their subscribers and viewers,” the companies said.
In communication from DirecTV, the DBS provider said all TEGNA stations “will begin to be restored immediately” — starting with NBC affiliates ahead of the NFL playoff game featuring the Cleveland Browns at Houston Texans, which the Texans won.
The remaining stations came online at the same time or shortly after.
“We will continue to work with station owners and networks to align the price customers pay with the value they receive,” DirecTV said.
A potential pigskin panic was already being discussed in late November 2023. The Browns/Texans game was on NBC.
This would have directly impacted TEGNA’s WKYC-3 in Cleveland … with precious time before the start of that matchup. KHOU-11 in Houston, a CBS affiliate, would have lost out on any shoulder coverage of a highly anticipated matchup.
Other markets impacted would have included Buffalo, where Bills game is being shifted to 4:30pm Monday (1/15) due to weather; Atlanta; Charlotte; Denver; Indianapolis; Jacksonville; Minneapolis; Phoenix; Portland, Ore.; Seattle; and St. Louis – now a secondary market to the Kansas City Chiefs, which played a game seen on Peacock that was not scheduled for the TEGNA station on Saturday evening.
Not impacted was the Kansas City DMA, where KSHB-41 is a station owned by The E.W. Scripps Co., nor neighboring markets Topeka, Ks., (where the NBC station is a Nexstar property) or St. Joseph, Mo. (where News-Press & Gazette Co. operates a low-power NBC affiliate).
By gametime at NRG Stadium, all differences were resolved between TEGNA and DirectTV — good news for Browns fans. That’s not to say future flare-ups between DirecTV and TEGNA, who saw an impasse in December 2020 in addition to the just-resolved matter.
