TEGNA blacks out Mediacom customers following huge rate increase demand – Mediacom

A blackout is an increasingly common negotiating tactic that channel owners use to force cable and satellite companies to pay unreasonable rate increases during contract renewals. TEGNA, Inc. owns WQAD ABC (Quad Cities); WOI ABC and KCWI CW (Des Moines); WZDX FOX/My Network TV (Huntsville); WHAS ABC (Louisville); WMAZ CBS and WMAZ-D2 CW (Macon); KARE NBC (Minneapolis-St. Paul); WWL CBS and WUPL My Network TV (New Orleans); WVEC ABC (Norfolk-Portsmouth-Newport News); KPNX NBC (Phoenix); KFMB CBS (San Diego); KSDK NBC (St. Louis); and KMSB FOX (Tucson). TEGNA believes that by holding Mediacom customers hostage they can extract a higher price for their product than if they relied on objective criteria to value their stations such as ratings, quality of content, etc.

Much like your local gas station, Mediacom is the retail distributor of products that we purchase at wholesale. Just like the price of oil affects the price of gas at the pump, the price of cable and satellite television service is impacted by wholesale cost of the channels we carry. The fees we pay to retransmit local broadcast stations like ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC are by far our fastest growing wholesale cost component.

TEGNA has become the latest station owner to exploit our Nation’s outdated federal broadcast television laws in an effort to boost its bottom line.

After extensive negotiations towards a new agreement, TEGNA is still demanding a significant rate increase over our previous agreement. Since these costs will ultimately be absorbed by the hard working residents of rural Alabama, Arizona, California, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, and Virginia, we have repeatedly communicated to TEGNA that their outrageous financial demands are unacceptable.

Mediacom remains willing to leave the stations on while negotiations continue, but in an attempt to force Mediacom to accept a bad deal, TEGNA has resorted to using the threat of a blackout to hold our customers hostage. Unfortunately, this ruthless tactic has become the calling card of the broadcast television industry in recent years.

This problem extends far beyond just Mediacom, and many cable and satellite companies regularly find themselves threatened with similar shutdowns. In fact, TEGNA has blacked out its broadcast TV stations from hundreds of thousands of satellite subscribers in recent years including Dish Network in December 2018 and DirecTV/AT&T in December 2020.

Mediacom is continuing to work hard to achieve a viable and affordable solution; however, the decision to pull the stations from your channel lineup rests entirely with TEGNA.

What channels does TEGNA own?

Why did TEGNA pull the channels off of the Mediacom Channel lineup?

Why doesn’t Mediacom just pay what TEGNA is demanding so that I can continue to get the shows I want to watch?

It’s our goal to provide you with a great programming lineup at a reasonable price. When the channel owners ask for more money, we negotiate with them in an effort to keep the costs you ultimately pay as low as possible. Many channel owners routinely demand 25%, 50%, 100%, or even higher increases during contract renewal negotiations even though ratings for their channels have dropped and/or their popular programs have been cancelled.

Why can’t Mediacom just replace the TEGNA stations with another local market station?

Mediacom would do that, but the individual TV stations have exclusive broadcasting rights over the affiliated network and syndicated programming they air in their markets. Under existing federal law, the owners can prevent Mediacom from replacing your local broadcast station with the signal of an out of market broadcast station. In short, local broadcast stations have been given monopoly power by the federal government and they use that power to squeeze more money out of cable and satellite companies and their customers.

Why shouldn’t I switch providers so I can continue to get the shows I want to watch?

We are doing everything we can to get TEGNA’s stations back in your lineup under terms that are fair to you. Should TEGNA continue to be uncooperative, you should not switch TV providers for a couple reasons:

This problem extends far beyond just Mediacom, and many cable and satellite companies regularly find themselves threatened with similar shutdowns. In fact, TEGNA has blacked out its broadcast TV stations from hundreds of thousands of satellite subscribers in recent years including Dish Network (2018), Verizon Fios (2018) and DirecTV/AT&T (2020). Nationally, there have been over 1,100 broadcast station blackouts since the beginning of 2015, and most have involved either Dish Network or AT&T-DirecTV. If you choose a provider that still has your favorite stations, you may be impacted by this same situation at a later time.

When consumers switch providers as a result of a carriage negotiation, they are essentially enabling the anti-consumer pay-TV model that exists today. Media conglomerates like TEGNA can squeeze more money out of consumers if they can rely on them to switch every time a provider doesn’t agree to unreasonable terms.