Nexstar Media Group Stations Go Dark On DirecTV As Carriage Dispute Begins

Armando Tinoco
·2 min read
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A new carriage dispute has been initiated between Nexstar Media Group and DirecTV, forcing more than 150 local TV stations to go dark on one of the country’s largest pay-TV providers.

The companies failed to come to terms with a new agreement, and subscribers are now deprived of local stations including CW affiliates in New York City (WPIX) and Los Angeles (KTLA). The disruption affects DirecTV, Uverse and DirecTV Stream subscribers. While DirecTV was spun off by AT&T into a privately held entity that doesn’t regularly report subscriber numbers, it reportedly came into 2023 with about 13 million subscribers, making it one of the largest pay-TV operators. About 10 million customers are affected by the blackout. Cord-cutting has whittled away at the subscriber base of DirecTV and other distributors in recent years.

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Nexstar is the largest U.S. owner of local TV stations and also owns cable network NewsNation and a controlling stake in the CW broadcast network. Affiliate stations for all broadcast networks as well as NewsNation are part of the impasse.

“DirecTV and Nexstar were unable to reach a new distribution agreement allowing the DirecTV the right to continue airing the highly-rated programming on Nexstar’s local stations. In addition, DirecTV rejected Nexstar’s offer to extend the current distribution agreement to Oct. 31, 2023,” Nexstar said in a statement.

“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,” the statement continued. “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.”

After the carriage contract ended, DirecTV also weighed in on the blackout claiming, “Nexstar has a long track record of forcing programming outages in an effort to unnecessarily raise prices,” said Rob Thun, chief content officer of DirecTV.

“We will continue to work with Nexstar to reach an agreement and will take all necessary actions to provide our customers access to their favorite programming while protecting them from unwarranted price increases,” Thun added.

Dade Hayes contributed to this report.

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