DirecTV announced today that they have lost all Nexstar stations, which consists of 120 stations in 97 markets in the United States. This means that those viewers will not have access to their local ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX stations, as well as their local stations.
DirecTV made a statement on their website saying this:
“We’re grateful we’re your TV provider. We want to offer you the best TV experience at a value that also makes sense to you. We had hoped to prevent Nexstar from removing its stations from your TV channel lineup. We even offered Nexstar more money to keep their stations available. However, Nexstar simply said no and chose to remove them instead. By doing so, Nexstar has put you in the center of its negotiations.”
The company has also said that Nexstar has said that they want to increase their fees, which DirecTV was willing to pay, but that Nexstar was still asking for too much.
They also made this statement when it comes to national networks programming and the ratings and viewership that it receives:
“The four major broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC) have together lost about half their primetime audience over the past few years. Despite this, Nexstar is demanding the largest increase that AT&T has ever seen from any content provider.”
Nexstar said in a statement that AT&T, the company that owns DirecTV, “unilaterally dropped the network and local community programming.” According to them, DirecTV refused to extend programming to consumers until an August 2 deadline.
DirecTV and Nexstar are still negotiating new contracts between the two companies and will hopefully come up with a compromise soon, but so far, no timeline has been set for this.
DirecTV (satellite), DirecTV NOW and AT&T U-Verse customers will be impacted the most by this. DirecTV NOW is available on the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Apple TV and Mac to stream from, so users will no longer have access to their local and national programming from the national networks if their local affiliate is a Nexstar station.
The good news is that this will not impact users who use AT&T WatchTV, as that streaming service does not have any local stations or affiliates.
