Carrier Conflict Leads to DirectTV Removing 12 Channel Offerings

UPDATE: 2024/02/12 10:08 EST BY CORBIN DAVENPORT

Channels Restored

DirectTV and Cox Media have agreed to a new multi-year deal that restores all affected channels for DirectTV, DirectTV Steam, and U-verse customers.

The channels on cable or streaming TV are there because of business deals, and when those fall through, it can mean outages for customers. Millions of DirecTV subscribers have now been cut off from some local stations, as DirectTV wasn’t able to reach a new deal with Cox Media Group before the previous contract expired.

Cox Media Group has announced that 12 local channels have been removed for DirectTV, DirecTV Stream, and U-verse customers in nine markets, following a failed negotiation. CMG is painting it as an anti-customer situation from DirecTV’s part, saying that it “has already dropped hundreds of stations over the last few months, and this latest drop is a continuation of its ongoing mission against local journalism.” Marian Pittman, EVP of CMG, said that “while we’ve been signing dozens of fair-market carriage deals that bring our high-quality programming to more than 50 million viewers, DirecTV has been dropping hundreds of TV stations and depriving its customers of the local content they want and paid DirecTV for.”

DirecTV, on the other hand, is blaming CMG for the situation, pointing out that CMG has already pulled its channels from Dish and that its threatening to pull them from other satellite TV providers as well. Whatever actually transpired in those negotiations, those channels are not available anymore for DirecTV users.

There’s no complete list of affected channels from DirecTV or Cox Media Group. DirecTV simply says 12 stations “in 9 metro areas” were removed, while CMG only said “all” its TV stations were removed. CMG has a list of its TV stations on its website, but there are only nine on the page. The incomplete list is available below:

• ABC: WSB in Atlanta, GA
• FOX: WFXT in Boston, MA
• ABC: WSOC in Charlotte, NC
• CBS: WHIO in Dayton, OH
• FOX: KLSR in Eugene, OR
• ABC: WFTV in Orlando, FL
• NBC: WPXI in Pittsburgh, PA
• CBS: KIRO in Seattle, WA

If you happen to be a frequent viewer of any of the removed channels, you can try asking DirecTV to reinstate them, set up a TV antenna , or move to a different TV provider. There are some CBS stations being removed as a result of this, and CBS will broadcast the Super Bowl—although it will also be broadcasted on Nickelodeon.

Source: Cox Media Group , DirecTV , The TV Answer Man

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