Dish Cuts Off 22 Disney-Owned Regional Sports Networks
July 26 2019 - 1:31PM
Dow Jones News
By Joe Flint
Dish Network Corp. has stopped carrying 22 regional sports
networks owned by the Walt Disney Co., the result of a contract
dispute.
The channels, which went dark Friday morning on Dish and its
direct-to-consumer streaming platform Sling, are the sports
networks that Disney acquired in its $71.3 billion acquisition of
the bulk of entertainment assets of 21st Century Fox earlier this
year.
Disney is in the process of selling 21 of the regional sports
networks to Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. in a deal valued at more
than $10 billion. The one other channel -- New York's YES Network,
which carries Yankee baseball -- is being sold to group that
includes the Yankees, Sinclair and Amazon.com Inc.
Disney retained an outside adviser to handle the distribution
negotiations for the sports networks with Dish.
A spokeswoman for the regional sports networks said an offer
that would have kept the current terms in place in a new deal was
rejected.
Negotiations between the two companies have ceased.
The regional sports TV business model is broken," said Andy
LeCuyer, Dish senior vice president of programming. "It relies on
the majority of customers subsidizing the slim minority who
actually watch these channels, he said, adding that sports channels
"should be like a ticket to the ballpark -- fans who want to watch
the game should be the ones who pay for it."
Typically regional sports networks are among the most expensive
services for distributors to carry, with the cost then being passed
on to customers. As consumers continue to abandon their pay-TV
services in favor of lower-cost alternatives, distributors such as
Dish have been pushing hard to lower programming costs. In
addition, while regional sports networks have hardcore fans,
ratings in general for such services have waned in recent years.
Furthermore, when the channels aren't carrying games, viewership
becomes anemic.
The fight with the Fox Regional Sports Network, as they are
known, is the latest of many for Dish over the past several years.
It stopped carrying AT&T Inc.'s HBO and Cinemax channels in
November, and prior to that it dropped and then restored many big
networks including Fox Corp.'s Fox News, CBS Corp.'s CBS and
AT&T's CNN. Earlier this year, it restored carriage of the
Spanish language network Univision after a nine-month battle.
Dish's deals to carry the FX and National Geographic channels
that Disney also acquired are up as well but are still being
carried, and a person close the negotiatons described the talks as
productive.
The deal Dish has with Fox Corp. to carry its local TV stations
and Fox Sports 1 also has expired; however, the two companies
reached an agreement for a short-term extension.
Fox Corp. and Wall Street Journal parent News Corp share common
ownership.
Dish isn't alone among distributors pushing back against
programmers seeking rate increases at a time when cord-cutting by
consumers continues to grow. Late last week, AT&T's DirecTV and
U-Verse stopped carrying CBS -owned properties including its local
TV stations in several of the nation's biggest markets.
AT&T is also currently in a fight with Nexstar Media Group
Inc., one of the largest owners of local TV stations in the
country. Nexstar stations went dark on AT&T platforms three
weeks ago.
Write to Joe Flint at joe.flint@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 26, 2019 13:16 ET (17:16 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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