A new carriage dispute has been initiated between Nexstar Media Group and DirecTV forcing more than 150 local TV stations to go dark.
Both companies did not come to terms with a new agreement and subscribers are now deprived of local stations that include the CW’s affiliate stations in New York City WPIX and Los Angeles KTLA. The disruption affects DirecTV, Uverse and DirecTV Stream subscribers.
“DirecTV and Nexstar were unable to reach a new distribution agreement allowing the DirecTV the right to continue airing the highly-rated programming on Nexstar’s local stations. In addition, DirecTV rejected Nexstar’s offer to extend the current distribution agreement to Oct. 31, 2023,” Nexstar said in a statement.
“Nexstar has been negotiating tirelessly and in good faith in an attempt to reach a mutually agreeable multi-year contract with DirecTV since May, offering the same fair market rates it offered to other distribution partners with whom it completed successful negotiations in the past year,” the statement continued. “Nexstar routinely reaches amicable retransmission and carriage agreements with its cable, satellite, and telco partners—in the last three years alone, the company has successfully completed agreements with more than 500 distribution partners.”
The carriage dispute also bars subscribers from NewsNation, which has also gone dark.
After the carriage contract ended, DirecTV also weighed in on the blackout claiming “Nexstar has a long track record of forcing programming outages in an effort to unnecessarily raise prices,” said Rob Thun, chief content officer of DirecTV.
“We will continue to work with Nexstar to reach an agreement and will take all necessary actions to provide our customers access to their favorite programming while protecting them from unwarranted price increases,” Thun added.