I wanted to give you a quick update on the Dish-Hearst fee fight.
The update is basically that there is no update. The two sides are still pointing the finger of blame at each other and it appears that no solution is on the horizon.
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A California congresswoman (Rep. Anna Eshoo) late last week urged the companies to reach a deal, but of course, that’s what politicians do in these fights: Call for a solution without doing anything to prevent the fights in the first place such as reforming the retransmission law that enables local stations to pull their signals if their demands are not met.
I will continue to monitor this dispute and will report back here if anything significant changes.
Meanwhile, on day 19 of the fee fight, 33 Hearst-owned local stations are still in the dark on Dish.
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— Phillip Swann
Dish is doing Hearst (any any other TV station) a favor by re-transmitting their signal. The fact that Dish has to “pay for doing them a favor” is ludicrous in the first place. Its a free signal! In states that are large and have small spread out populations Dish is making sure that more people see advertising content than if they had to rely on an antenna alone. Let Hearst try building a satellite, a rocket to place it into earth orbit, and then maintain and keep it operational 24/7. Geez…..
Possible that Dish wants to carry Hearst TV stations but Hearst won’t allow Dish because Hearst likely actually been using Duane Lammers firm Max Retrans for a consultant to assist Hearst with handling the negotiations to negotiate retransmission consent negotiations with Dish over carriage of Hearst TV stations with Duane Lammers-Max Retrans preferring on failing to allow Dish carriage of Hearst TV stations because Dish ain’t willing to not just only pay up for the increase in carriage fees for the privilege and right of carriage of Hearst TV stations, but also not help pay fees to Duane Lammers firm Max Retrans to assist Hearst in negotiating retransmission consent negotiations with Dish. Duane Lammers-Max Retrans would only allow Dish carriage of Hearst TV stations if it is willing to not just only pay up for the increase in carriage fees for the privilege and right of carriage of Hearst TV stations, but also help pay fees to Duane Lammers firm Max Retrans to assist Hearst in negotiating retransmission consent negotiations with Dish as a precondition allowing Dish carriage of Hearst TV stations if Hearst likely actually been using Duane Lammers firm Max Retrans for a consultant to assist Hearst with handling the negotiations to negotiate retransmission consent negotiations with Dish and recently DIRECTV over carriage of Hearst TV stations.
The dispute is mainly wanting Dish to pay the increase in retransmission consent fees and how much it wants to pay for Hearst stations to help pay down all the debts for the improvements over at their stations including for the rights for $1.00-2.00 per month to NBC for reverse compensation under Comcast by 2020-2021; $1.00-2.00 per month to CBS for reverse compensation by 2020-2021; $1.00-2.00 per month to ABC for reverse compensation under Disney by 2020-2021; $1.00-2.00 per month to CW for reverse compensation by 2020-2021; up to $1.00-2.00 per month for using ATV Broadcast, Duane Lammers firm Max Retrans, or one of the other consultants Hearst uses to assist Hearst with handling the negotiations to negotiate retransmission consent negotiations with Dish by 2020-2021; up to $1.00-2.00 per month for various miscellaneous items and stuff and things including syndicated programming, pay TV stations for being connected to fiber optic cable line networks allowing the TV stations to be connected to the cable headend, satellite headend, and teleco headend, pay for equipment allowing the local TV station to be able to encode captioning on local newscasts and various live events, pay for updating all weather equipment to serve TV viewers even during poor weather conditions, pay employees equal salaries and wages, utilities, finance payments, property taxes, FCC-related legal expenses including paying fines to the FCC for engaging in various violations and various other civil penalty offenses, enhanced heightened security at the TV stations and at Hearst headquarters, pay property insurance that help the TV station to be able to replaced damages to the TV station studio facility and equipment, pay health care insurance that are costs to the employees through the Affordable Care Act known as Obamacare, also would likely want the fees going to help purchase brand new encoders and encoding equipment including video encoders that allow TV stations to live streamed all of the TV stations newscasts and various local events online from the TV stations website and from livestream or newson/watchnewson, broadcasting equipment that would allow Hearst stations using Dual HD with 2 of the Big 4 both in HDTV and a single or dual Little 2/independent in SDTV thanks to improvements in encoders and encoding equipment and other equipment allowing broadcasters and TV stations to be able to transmit 2 1080 or 720 HDTV feeds(either 1 1080 HDTV and 1 720 HDTV feeds on a single RF channel, 2 1080 HDTV feeds on a single RF channel , or 2 720 HDTV feeds on a single RF channel) and 1 to 4 480 SDTV feeds being transmitted on a single TV station digital RF channel and fully upgrade to full HDTV facilities from deal-making with hardware and program vendors, preparing to pay for all brand new equipment for the TV stations to be able to share with another TV station when the incentive auction starts as part of the beginning of the spectrum auction, channel sharing, and channel repacking that started on March 29, 2016 to be able to fully make the transition to fully upgrade to ATSC 3.0 to allow to produce content in 4KTV or 8KTV in the UHDTV format in a few years in the future as part of the ongoing incentive auction as Hearst of one of the 9 original broadcasters and broadcasting groups to back Pearl TV ATSC 3.0 venture, to help launch down payments to possibly pursue in acquiring various TV stations when they are being put up for sale to be bought out by a TV station group or operator by 2020-2021; all in all for the total average cost of the average TV station being up to $3.00-6.00 per month from each subscriber every month by 2020-2021 all by engaging in old rigid Paramount Pictures block booking & blind bidding by tying and old RKO General bribery & dishonest behavioral practices.
After searching numerous articles/posts on this subject, I read a couple posts on other sites advocating the same thoughts I’ve been having since January.
I believe it’s entirely appropriate for consumers to protest the use of this blackout as a means to influence the contract negotiations between these 2 companies. I don’t particularly care how those negotiations resolve (I’m not familiar with their business relationship), but I do want Hearst to stop using blackouts, like they did before with DirecTV.
I think it’s time for consumers to organize a social-media-based boycott specifically to end the blackout. The problem is, we cannot directly boycott Hearst TV, we are not their customers. But we can boycott all local businesses that continue to pay for advertising on Hearst stations. If we do this right, we can demonstrate to Hearst that deploying a blackout will result in a net loss rather than an easy win.
I have no experience with organizing a boycott. I imagine this is something that can be done by setting up a Facebook page. I would like to find some help from anybody who is knowledgeable about such.
Is anybody with me so far?
I can receive my local Hearst owned ABC station via over the air antenna just fine. I have chosen to watch my favorite ABC shows on the ABC.com app on my Roku box and my tablets. Works great and hopefully zero advertising dollars are now going to the Hearst Corp.
I hope DISH sticks to their guns and does not NEGOTIATE a higher retransmission fee! I find it absolutely ridiculous that anyone gets a retransmission fee. Why? You are paying for the privilege or showing something given away for free. That’s stupid. We are seeing the result of this Pandoras box being opened. Greedy broadcasters can keep hiking up rates and carriers have to pay……well stop. Watch NBC online or heaven forbid watch another channel. Show Hearst we can live without their channels. Support DISH in this fight as enough is enough. It is time to stand up and end retransmission fee increases!
This MIGHT make some sense if Dish was allowed some of the local TV airtime to swap in Dish compensated advertising. Instead, they have to PAY the local TV stations to widely distribute the local signal to remote areas where it is NOT receivable by OTA antennas. The local stations keep their local advertising revenue with a wider audience.
I am a fulltime RVer, retired from Sacramento. While I lived in Sacramento 30 years KCRA NBC was my go to news and late night variety channel. NO MORE. I have learned to live without KCRA during the piggy Hearst (Can you spell MONEY?) blackout. The Tonight Show is not 1/4 of what it was with Johnny Carson, and Saturday Night Live is patently UNFUNNY.
This blackout by Hearst is in the “finest” traditions of “Citizen Hearst”.