Tribune TV Stations Blacked Out On Charter Spectrum

Nearly three dozen Tribune Media television stations, including KTLA Channel 5 in Los Angeles, went dark Wednesday afternoon on Charter Communications’ Spectrum pay-TV service after the two companies failed to reach agreement on a new distribution deal.

The LATimes reports customers in more than 6 million Charter Spectrum cable TV homes nationwide — including 1.5 million in the Los Angeles region — were swept up in the latest fee dispute between two major TV companies. The two sides have spent nearly two weeks in a tense standoff over Tribune Media’s proposed fee increase for the right to carry Tribune Media’s programming as part of the Spectrum pay-TV packages.

Spectrum is the brand name for Charter’s pay-TV, internet and phone service.

“We’re extremely disappointed that we do not have an agreement on the renewal of our contract with Spectrum,” Gary Weitman, Tribune Media spokesman, said Wednesday in a statement. “We’ve offered Spectrum fair market rates for our top-rated local news, live sports and high-quality entertainment programming.… Spectrum has refused our offer and failed to negotiate in a meaningful fashion.”

Charter, in a statement, called the blackout “unfortunate.” The Stamford, Conn., company complained that Tribune simply wanted too much money for its programming.

“Tribune is demanding an increase of more than double what we pay today for the same programming,” a Charter representative said in an email statement. “That is more than we pay any other broadcaster. They’re not being reasonable.”

Tribune Media has been demanding that Charter pay higher fees for the rights to retransmit the signals of 33 Tribune television stations in Charter Spectrum markets. The Chicago broadcaster also asked Charter to pay more to carry Tribune’s cable channel, WGN America.

The showdown comes at a troubled time for the pay-TV industry. Charter and other cable operators have struggled to control programming costs in an effort to stanch a migration of customers to lower-cost streaming services. The pay-TV industry was projected to lose 1.1 million customers in 2018, including more than 200,000 cable TV subscribers from Charter, according to recent estimates from MoffettNathanson Research.

There were about 140 television blackouts in 2018. An impasse between Verizon Communications Inc. and TV broadcaster Tegna Inc. resulted in an outage Monday of network affiliate stations in Washington, D.C., Norfolk, Va., and Buffalo, N.Y. on Verizon Fios systems.

The conflict is over so-called retransmission fees — the money that cable, satellite TV and telephone companies must pay to broadcast local TV station signals as part of their channel lineups. Television station owners in 2018 collected a combined $10 billion in such fees, up from $9.3 billion in 2017, according to the alliance.