Negotiations Heat Up Between Dish Network and Sinclair Broadcast

One side cites “corporate greed” and the other blames a “flawed economic model.” Who will win in this dispute between Sinclair Broadcast and Dish Network?

One day Dish Network was calling out Sinclair Broadcast for being greedy, and the next day the satellite provider received response in the form of a contemptuous letter.

Sinclair Broadcast is quite a large broadcast company which owns or operates 74 television stations. These stations even include affiliates of networks like ABC, Fox, CW, CBS, and NBC. On Tuesday the company took action against Dish Network’s statement saying that Dish Network operates with a “flawed economic model.” The model allegedly provides just as much or more compensation to channels with very little to no audience as those broadcast channels.

On Wednesday the contract between Dish Network and Sinclair Broadcast will expire, and that might leave millions of Dish Network customers without some of the most popular television channels. Sinclair prompted Dish subscribers to look elsewhere for the Sinclair Broadcast channels that could be lost.

“Sinclair suggests its viewers would be better served by simply switching its video service to a provider of Dish that values Sinclair stations enough to carry them,” said Sinclair in a statement released Wednesday.

For alternatives Sinclair listed DIRECTV, AT&T’s U-verse, Verizon’s FiOS, and cable companies available in each market. In some cases there are Sinclair channels that offer content online completely free of charge on top of the other available options.

Before Sinclair’s Tuesday letter and Wednesday statement, it was Dish Network that was throwing the punches, even suggesting that government lawmakers should look into the disagreement.

Monday Dish Network recounted the fact that this year alone broadcasting companies around the U.S. have chosen to black out over 50 channels on different pay-TV companies several times. Dish also mentioned that the American Television Alliance lately asked Congress to review the rules that support those blackouts.

In June the American Television Alliance released a statement saying, “Broadcasters increasingly hold viewers hostage by using blackouts as a retransmission consent negotiation tool.” Dish Network referenced that statement on Monday in the press release when discussing the dispute with Sinclair Broadcast.

Dish Senior VP of Programming, David Shull, even went as far as to say that Sinclair is asking for more money than any other station in the country. Shull believes that this goes “beyond pure corporate greed…”