Viewers are being caught in the cross-fire as television stations argued for higher fees from cable and satellite distributors in a system called retransmission consent. Scores of distribution deals were set to expire on Saturday night.
On Sunday, however, there were almost no reports of station blackouts. As is normally the case, the warnings in public were superseded by successful negotiations in private.
But in New York, at least, there was one prominent blackout on Sunday, though it involved a cable channel, MSG, not a broadcast station. MSG Networks, which carries New York Knicks games and other sporting events, was taken off Time Warner Cable’s system at midnight as a dispute continued between the two companies.
“Other than MSG, a quiet New Year’s,” said Alex Dudley, a spokesman for Time Warner Cable in New York. He said of MSG Networks, “We’re waiting for them to come back to the table.”
MSG countered in a statement early Sunday morning, “We certainly hope Time Warner Cable returns to the negotiating table and reconsiders our good-faith proposals.”
Time Warner Cable also has a continuing retransmission dispute with a station in Corpus Christi, Tex. A Fox-owned station in Atlanta was blacked out in north Georgia on Sunday in a dispute with a small television operator there. In parts of rural Virginia, an ABC affiliate was blacked out in a similar dispute.
With millions of dollars at stake, such issues are not likely to go away quickly. If the online comments from customers are any indication, the lasting effect of these fights may be public antipathy for both the programmers and the distributors — potentially a costly outcome at a time when both sides are worried about the prospect of Internet alternatives to monthly TV subscriptions.
The retransmission consent system has come under scrutiny in recent years from lawmakers and regulators; the Federal Communications Commission signaled last year that it would consider making changes to the rules that govern the process.
The local stations that benefit from the process assert that the occasional blackouts that do happen overshadow the hundreds that do not.
“These agreements invariably get done because there’s enormous incentive for both sides to do a deal,” Dennis Wharton, a spokesman for the stations’ trade group, the National Association of Broadcasters, said Sunday.
“Yes,” he said, “there are often threats and overheated rhetoric, but you’ll find that almost every retransmission consent deal gets successfully concluded. Think of these as marriages and carriages of convenience.”
Television viewers have little visibility into the deals themselves. In fact, it is hard to assess how many such deals were struck last week because they mainly happen in secret.
“Just because ‘deals got done’ does not mean the market is working or that the market isn’t saturated with anticompetitive conduct by broadcasters,” said Matthew M. Polka, chief executive of the American Cable Association, which represents small cable operators. He noted that major networks were insisting on sharing in the fees that stations received from distributors.
“Instead of making investments in their news and public affairs programming, TV stations send their retransmission consent fees to the networks to help pay off the burden of extravagant contracts with professional sports leagues,” he said.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=29d01b8ddf52d6f2f1ea1773816b8731
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