More than 150 local TV stations owned by Nexstar Media Group went dark on DirecTV’s platform as of 4 p.m. PT Sunday after the sides failed to come to terms on a new retransmission consent agreement.
The blackout includes Nexstar stations in New York (WPIX), Los Angeles (KTLA) and Chicago (WGN) and also Nexstar’s NewsNation channel. In total, 159 station serving 113 markets went dark after a last push on negotiations in late June.
DirecTV serves about 12.7 million subscribers across the U.S. Nexstar said it offered to extend the current deal to Oct. 31 to allow contract talks to continue. Nexstar indicated that the blackout affected at least 10 million subscribers across DirecTV’s footprint.
“Nexstar remains hopeful that a resolution can be reached quickly to return to viewers their favorite network programming, live sporting events, in-depth local news, and other local content relevant to their communities, as well as critical emergency updates for which DirecTV is charging its subscribers,” Nexstar said.
DirecTV representatives could not immediately be reached for comment.
KTLA Los Angeles was among the Nexstar stations that have been running a crawl alert during news broadcasts warning DirecTV subscribers that the stations might come down.
“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,” Nexstar said. “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.”
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