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Dish dispute in Buffalo

M

mjlarochelle

I just saw a crawl on WGRZ (NBC) Buffalo stating that DISH Network may be dropping them as of October 7. According to WGRZ's website, the station and DISH have been unable to negotiate a carriage deal.

Is this affecting any other Gannett-owned stations, or other local stations?
 
KTHV (CBS) Little Rock is running the same boilerplate message as other Gannett stations with only CBS-centric statements placed within. Since I'm a former Dish Network customer and have OTA access to Little Rock (AR) and the El Dorado (AR) half of the Monroe LA/El Dorado AR stations I have no dog in this fight.
 
WFMY Greensboro, also Gannett-owned, and is running crawls
mostly about the prospect of the Triad's losing CBS programming.
I'm not affected; I have DirecTV and even if Gannett got into a dispute
with that provider, I would still have CBS from Raleigh, New York, and
Los Angeles.

The Triad has been very unfortunate in these disputes; earlier this year
there was the one between Time Warner Cable and the Hearst stations,
which caused the temporary loss of WXII and its replacement by WBRE
Wilkes-Barre, PA. Wonder if Dish would find an out-of-market CBS station
to replace WFMY if it came to that?
 
bpatrick said:
WFMY Greensboro, also Gannett-owned, and is running crawls
mostly about the prospect of the Triad's losing CBS programming.
I'm not affected; I have DirecTV and even if Gannett got into a dispute
with that provider, I would still have CBS from Raleigh, New York, and
Los Angeles.

The Triad has been very unfortunate in these disputes; earlier this year
there was the one between Time Warner Cable and the Hearst stations,
which caused the temporary loss of WXII and its replacement by WBRE
Wilkes-Barre, PA. Wonder if Dish would find an out-of-market CBS station
to replace WFMY if it came to that?
Click to expand...

Dish has alternate CBS affiliates, most satellite providers have alternate network feeds actually (though Dish and DirecTV are the only ones that carry them alongside an in-market network affiliate). Dish uses WCBS/New York as an east coast feed like DirecTV does, but instead of KCBS/Los Angeles, Dish's west coast CBS feed is KPIX/San Francisco. In fact, all the west coast feeds for the Big Four networks on Dish are San Francisco stations: KTVU for Fox, KNTV for NBC and KGO-TV for ABC. The only Los Angeles station that they use as a network's west coast feed is KTLA for The CW on its superstations package.

It's interesting that satellite providers are allowed to have three or four feeds (one local, plus out-of-markets) of each major network, but the FCC disallows cable providers from carrying out-of-market stations in areas where there is an in-market affiliate (though stations have to ask for the right of exclusivity to get out-of-market stations taken off a cable provider if a market gains an affiliate of a certain network, hence why there are a few markets where there are two affiliates of the same network on one system). This is the opposite sitch in Canada as the CRTC allows satellite and cable providers to carry both in- and out-of-market stations. Cable subscribers here in the States wouldn't have to lose access to network shows during these retrans impasses, if the FCC applied such a rule here allowing cable operators to carry alternate network feeds (one west coast, one east coast) on digital cable.
 
I live in the Raleigh-Durham market, and on the fringe of
Greensboro/Winston-Salem/High Point. WFMY has been
airing in my town since 1949; WGHP, since 1963 (WXII is
too far away and never put a clear signal down here).
The people here demanded that WFMY and WGHP be left
on both the cable and satellite providers, and there were
no attempts by WRAL (the CBS affiliate in Raleigh with a sort-of-sister
Fox station, WRAZ) to keep them off. So even if WFMY gets taken off
Dish, its subscribers still have a local CBS affiliate.

Although I know it will never happen (local stations would complain about
the potential damage to local advertising), I wish I could pick my own
markets to watch; I'd pick Atlanta, Dallas, Louisville, and San Antonio.
 
bpatrick said:
Wonder if Dish would find an out-of-market CBS station
to replace WFMY if it came to that?
Click to expand...

Legally they can't. Dish got it nuts in a wringer back in 06 for giving distants to folks who didnt legally qualify. So from 06 until 2 years ago they couldnt give you any station outside of your area.
Now they can only import a station if there is no affiliate there. Retrans disagreements do not qualify for an imported station.
 
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