It seems like in almost every quarterly earnings call he conducts, Dish Network chairman Charlie Ergen addresses an ongoing carriage/retrans dispute by noting that the programmer now wants more for less.
But listening to Ergen discuss the three-month-old broadcast retransmission impasse between Dish and Cox Media Group Thursday during Dish’s Q4 earnings report, we can't remember a call in which the satellite TV pioneer swung harder and lower.
Also read: Dish Network Reports Net Income of $936 Million in Q4
Local broadcast affiliates, he declared, “are the newspaper of this decade.”
Trust former newspaper workers when we say, that sir, is a low blow. Ergen, who will turn 70 on March 1, confessed that he is among a dwindling number of Americans who still reads a newspaper. “But I get my news elsewhere, and if I lost my newspaper, I’d be OK.
“The high-value shows are all going to OTT,” Ergen said, noting that even broadcast TV’s most productive remaining content, NFL games, can now be found on platforms like Amazon Prime Video.
“Viewers of Cox channels are not coming back for their local news,” he said. “They’re watching something on HBO or Netflix. And any customer who wanted Cox from us has left Dish already.”
Cox stations in nine markets were pulled off of Dish satellite TV and Sling TV platforms in late November, with the two sides unable to agree to a new broadcast retransmission deal.
Certainly, the overall broadcast TV audience is shrinking fast. NBC won the 2021-22 broadcast TV season, despite losing 7% of its audience year over year.
Dish said that Cox, which is controlled by private equity company Apollo Global Management, is seeking fee increases in the 75% range, which the company said in a December statement is “unreasonable given that Cox’s viewership on Dish TV has significantly declined over the past three years.”
“We have no leverage against Cox,” Ergen added. “They have absolute monopolies in our market. But the consumer has leverage. And the consumer is telling us, ‘We do not want you to raise prices.‘ ”
Also as he has in the past, Ergen compared the rise of retrans fees to demands made by operators of regional sports networks. “The cost gets so high, any rational company will make more money by not having the service,” he said.
“Broadcasters have a lot of debt to pay, and maybe they haven't gotten the memo, but the next step for retrans is down, not up,” Ergen said. ■
