One week ago, the MVPD controlled by Altice USA dropped the MSG Network. At 5pm Eastern on Friday, it blocked access to 63 Nexstar Media Group-owned broadcast TV stations across 42 markets, as well as NewsNation.
The latest retransmission consent battle, this time a fight pitting the nation’s biggest owner of TV stations versus Optimum, has just begun.
Some 42 DMAs are impacted, in addition to its cable television news network. Mission Broadcasting-owned WPIX-11 in New York, which Nexstar operates via a shared services agreement, is also off of Optimum — perhaps the most significant result of the impasse, given Optimum’s major presence in Westchester and Nassau Counties of New York.
As such, roughly two million subscribers across the country now face the absence of Nexstar-owned stations until a new carriage agreement is reached. Aside from the New York metropolitan area, Optimum markets where Nexstar has stations include Hartford, and Greenville, N.C.
On a microsite created by Optimum to keep customers appraised of the negotiations, the MVPD says it has “worked tirelessly” on behalf of its customers to reach an agreement with Nexstar. However, “they’ve refused to offer a deal that is fair for our customers. As a result, we no longer carry their channels.”
And, Optimum is pointing customers who seek Nexstar content to get Fubo, the sports-focused virtual MVPD that was acquired earlier this week by The Walt Disney Co.
Later on Friday afternoon, Optimum released a formal and more lengthy statement defending its stance.
“Despite Optimum’s best efforts to reach a fair and reasonable agreement with Nexstar, the owners of multiple broadcast stations, their content has been removed from Optimum TV lineups, effective 5:00PM ET today,” the company said, adding that Optimum “offered an extension to keep Nexstar’s content on the air while we continued to negotiate to reach a fair deal for our customers, but Nexstar refused.”
There’s more from Optimum on the impasse, and it’s very accusatory. “Unfortunately, Nexstar is using an anti-consumer negotiation tactic – tying local channels to less popularones – requiring Optimum and its customers to pay for channels like NewsNation, which has essentially no viewership, in order to continue carrying Nexstar broadcast stations in various markets across the country,” it claims.
Nexstar has a much different take on the situation.
“Altice has consistently made unreasonable and unprecedented demands of Nexstar, culminating with their decision to walk away from the negotiations,” said Michael Biard, Nexstar’s President/Chief Operating Officer. “Unfortunately, this seems to be a regular pattern of behavior for Altice.”
Biard also took aim at “the difficulty of Altice’s financial situation, burdened as it is by billions in debt,” adding that the solution to the company’s fiscal woes “isn’t to force Optimum subscribers to continually pay more while getting less.”
When any resolution between Altice USA’s Optimum and Nexstar may come is could be anyone’s guess. A source tells RBR+TVBR that Optimum “walked away from negotiations today unilaterally and have been pretty unresponsive throughout.”
Nexstar noted in a press release issued late Friday that it has tried to engage in good faith negotiations with Altice since October 2024, “only to have Altice refuse to do so by repeatedly demanding special terms that are wildly out of step with both our longstanding relationship and the cable television marketplace.”
For Optimum, tweaking NewsNation carriage fees could be key for a new Nexstar deal.
“[W]e note that in any given month, 90% of customers – more than 1.2 million – never tune in to NewsNation, making it unfair to force customers to pay tens of millions of dollars for content they never watch and hold them hostage to force carriage of broadcast stations,” Optimum claims. “Despite NewsNation’s shockingly low viewership, Nexstar has taken this one step further by demanding expanded distribution of the channel to hundreds of thousands more customers, requiring that even more customers who don’t watch it are made to pay for it.”
Given that tone, both parties could be at odds for the foreseeable future.
This is the pits. I am a 92yo woman and this is my favorite channel. I resent the fact that I pay for this channel and during my watching today, it was just stopped. Believe me if I could change from Optimum to another company, I would.
Optimum is pointing us to Fubo, but they aren’t paying for it. I already pay Optimum $370 a month for TV, Internet and phone service. I can’t afford to pay another $90 to Fubo to get cannels I’m already paying Optimum for. How about they reduce my bill for the missing channels since they didn’t replace them with anything else?
I think it’s a shame that two major companies can’t come to a reasonable agreement instead you hold the customers hostage to where we can’t watch the channel. Quit blaming each other and come to an agreement
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