Blackout Ends as Dish Settles Nasty Dispute With Huge Station Group

Local subscribers to the Dish Network had WGRZ-TV Channel 2 back on their sets Sunday evening after the station’s parent company reached a contract agreement with the satellite television service.

A statement from Tegna late on October 9th said: “Tegna has worked hard over the course of months to reach a deal with Dish”. TGNA have finally reached a multi-year carriage agreement. Deadline reports that the channels would return to the Dish Network line-up immediately, however, further details about the contract were released.

Dish, which has a legacy of playing hardball in negotiations, has been more willing than its pay-television peers to let TV channels go dark on its service when talks hit an impasse.

Dish Network is restoring 46 Tegna-owned network affiliate stations to its lineup, ending a more than 24-hour blackout in 38 markets. In that spirit, DISH offered a short-term contract extension to TEGNA that would include a retroactive true-up when new rates were agreed upon, and would preserve the ability of DISH customers to access the TEGNA local stations while negotiations continued. Average monthly pay-TV subscriber churn rate in the second quarter was 1.71% compared with 1.66% in the prior-year quarter.

“Despite DISH’s repeated efforts to blame programmers, the record is crystal clear – DISH is a serial dropper of channels”. There is only one party responsible for this blackout and that is Tegna broadcasting.

Naturally, this is not the first spat with a content provider for DISH.

Tegna, the company that owns KVUE, had been unable to reach a new agreement with Dish, even after a pair of extensions. In August 2015, the company had been in a serious retransmission tussle with leading local TV broadcaster Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on September 2, 2015. CBS had resulted in a short programming blackout in 18 local markets across the U.S.