Dish loses 7 channels in contract dispute with Turner Broadcasting
Dish's 14 million customers lose access to CNN, Turner Classic Movies and a handful of others as companies fail to negotiate new distribution deal.
Dish Network customers lost access to CNN, Turner Classic Movies, and a handful of other channels late Monday as the result of a contract dispute with Turner Broadcasting.
Turner Broadcasting, which licenses the channels for distribution to subscription services, pulled the channels from Dish's lineup upon the expiration of its current deal with the satellite service after the two companies were unable to negotiate renewed distribution terms. Other channels removed from Dish include Boomerang, Cartoon Network, CNN en Espanol, Headline News, and truTV.
Dish, which has about 14 million subscribers, said the channels were removed after Turner refused to extend the current agreement.
"In the past year, Dish has successfully renewed agreements with many large content providers," Warren Schlichting, Dish senior vice president of programming, said in a statement. "As a result, we are confident that we have offered a deal to Turner that reflects an appropriate value for our customers."
Turner countered that it had already made concessions in negotiations and blamed Dish for channels' removal.
"Turner has worked diligently for months to come to a fair agreement including multiple extensions and compromises, and it's unfortunate that Dish is once again operating in a disruptive manner that takes away networks and programming from their customers," Turner Broadcasting said in a statement. "We are hopeful our counterparts will return to the negotiating table, and we'll get a deal completed."
CNN and HLN programming was replaced by MSNBC content, while FXM Retro replaced TCM programming.
Programming blackouts have become a frequent occurrence of late in disputes between programming providers and subscription services. After a three-month absence, the Weather Channel returned to DirecTV's lineup after the two companies settled their dispute over carriage fees. A month-long blackout that cut off millions of Time Warner Cable subscribers from CBS programming ended in September 2013 when the two reached an updated content carriage agreement. (CBS is the parent company of CBS Interactive, the publisher of CNET.)