NewsNation and network and local programming provided by 63 of Nexstar Media Group’s television stations in 42 markets across the country have gone dark on Altice USA’s Optimum after the two parties failed to reach a new carriage deal prior to their current contract’s expiration on Friday evening.
Nexstar said it has tried to engage in good faith with Altice since October, but that it has refused to so by “repeatedly demanding special terms that are wildly out of step with both our longstanding relationship and the cable television marketplace.”
As a result, more than two million Americans have been “deprived” of “critical local news, the NFL Playoffs, live sports and other entertainment programming, as well as essential alerts regarding winter weather and natural disasters,” the company added.
“Altice has consistently made unreasonable and unprecedented demands of Nexstar, culminating with their decision to walk away from the negotiations,” said Nexstar’s President and Chief Operating Officer Michael Biard said in a statement. “Unfortunately, this seems to be a regular pattern of behavior for Altice, which dropped the MSG Network just last week, depriving millions of New York sports fans the opportunity to see their favorite teams in action. We understand the difficulty of Altice’s financial situation, burdened as it is by billions in debt, but the solution isn’t to force Optimum subscribers to continually pay more while getting less.”
Optimum fired back, arguing that it offered an extension to keep Nexstar’s content on the air as the two sides continue to negotiate, but that Nexstar refused. The company argued that Nexstar is using an “anti-consumer negotiation tactic” by requiring it and its customers to pay for NewsNation in order to continue carrying its broadcast stations.
“In any given month, 90% of customers – more than 1.2 million – never tune in to NewsNation, making it unfair to force customers to pay tens of millions of dollars for content they never watch and hold them hostage to force carriage of broadcast stations,” Optimum said. “Despite NewsNation’s shockingly low viewership, Nexstar has taken this one step further by demanding expanded distribution of the channel to hundreds of thousands more customers, requiring that even more customers who don’t watch it are made to pay for it.
It also said Nexstar is demanding the highest rates of any broadcasting group.
“Nexstar’s “all or nothing” approach of price gouging customers by forcing them to pay for content they don’t want and bundling different stations and channels together into the same negotiations – despite their varied programming and audiences across different states – is in no one’s best interest but their own,” the company’s statement continued. “Optimum values local programming and understands that viewers in New York do not watch the same content or have the same interests as viewers in Texas, Arkansas, or California, so it is unreasonable, anti-local, detrimental to customers, and unfair for Nexstar to demand unrelated and contrasting content carriage.”
Optimum said it remains open to continued negotiations and that customers looking for Nexstar-owned content can find it for free over the air with an antenna. ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX and CW channels are also available on Fubo and the NFL playoffs are available on ESPN, Peacock, Paramount+, Prime Video and NFL+.
