WHDH-TV, a unit of closely held Sunbeam Television Corp., made that charge and several others in a suit filed against Comcast Thursday in U.S. District Court in Boston. The suit is in response to NBC’s decision to drop the station as an affiliate of the network starting in 2017 in favor of media platforms owned by Comcast.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the suit claims that by dropping WHDH-TV, Comcast is not only breaching an agreement it made with NBC affiliates as part of its NBCUniversal purchase but violating the Federal Communication Commission’s public interest obligations.
An NBC spokeswoman said the company was “disappointed that Sunbeam has chosen to file this meritless lawsuit, and that it has chosen to do so by constructing baseless claims against our parent company.”
The acrimony between WHDH-TV and NBC is not an anomaly in the television business. The major broadcast networks are eager to control more of their distribution and that has led to several clashes in recent months with their affiliates.
The tensions between WHDH-TV and NBC began in 2013, according to the suit. It was then, WHDH said, that it began to hear rumblings that NBC planned on replacing the station as its affiliate with New England Cable Network, a local news channel that Comcast had long owned. WHDH said it confronted NBC and Comcast about this and was told it wasn’t true. WHDH-TV then tried to renew its affiliation with NBC only to be rebuffed.
Instead, in late 2015, NBC told WHDH-TV that it wasn’t renewing the pact and instead would create a local channel that it would deliver via cable using the facilities at its New England Cable Network, according to the suit.
Read More Now
No comments:
Post a Comment