A particularly bitter battle over carriage fees for Gray Media‘s broadcast television channels on one of the nation’s two direct broadcast satellite TV service providers has ended, with its channels being restored just in time for the Kentucky Derby.
Just after 9pm Eastern on Friday (5/1), the Atlanta-based company’s TV stations began sharing the news on their respective websites that Gray and Dish had reached a new retransmission consent agreement.
As is typical with such deals, terms were not made public. However, a quick return to the Dish lineup for some stations as KWCH-12 in Wichita and WTOC-11 in Savannah, Ga., both CBS affiliates, was seen. It also returned some 54 NBC affiliates to Dish — namely WAVE-3 in Louisville, which offers full-day coverage of the action from Churchill Downs to viewers and would have been in a difficult position of explaining to some locals why Kentucky Derby coverage was inaccessible on Dish.
The “blackout,” by law, of Gray Media stations on Dish began late in the day on March 10. The following day, Gray lashed out at Dish with a lengthy attack.
Louisville is one of 113 DMAs that were impacted by the impasse, only the latest chapter in a testy eight-year period between Gray Media and Dish. Trouble began in January 2017, with Gray pointing fingers at Dish for “its decision” to pull the company’s stations in lieu of a fresh retransmission consent accord.
For Dish and DirecTV, rising retransmission consent payments are a major concern, and groups such as the American Television Alliance (ATVA) have regularly pointed fingers at broadcasters as the sole culprit in a carriage fee fight.
With the release of its fourth quarter 2025 earnings in late February, Gray Media said it benefited from “better-than-expected” MVPD subscriber trends, which drove year-over-year growth in retransmission consent revenue less network affiliation fees, or “reverse compensation.”
In Q4 it came in at $134 million, rising from $130 million. However, for the full year of 2025, retransmission consent revenue declined by 7%.
