What a relief. According to the shortest press release ever, DISH and CBS have kissed and made up. I mean seriously, this is what DISH wrote:
ENGLEWOOD, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– DISH Network L.L.C. has reached a multi-year carriage agreement with CBS Corporation for its owned and operated local stations, as well as CBS Sports Network, Pop, and Smithsonian Channel. The channels are currently being restored to DISH customers. “We are grateful to our customers for their patience this holiday week as months of work has resulted in a deal that delivers CBS for years to come,” said Warren Schlichting, DISH executive vice president of Marketing, Programming and Media Sales. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
I suppose they could have just said, “Yep we’re back” but if you think about it they didn’t actually say much more than that, did they?
Still, it’s a good thing that these two companies figured out how to come to an agreement on a contract quickly. It didn’t stop some football games from airing yesterday, but in most other regards the blackout didn’t affect too many people in too many different ways.
The number of really high-profile channel blackouts seems to have dropped in the last couple of years, although I’ll be honest I don’t have hard data on that. I think station owners, faced with the hard fact that people actually watch stuff on the internet, just don’t play chicken with pay-TV companies quite so often. That’s got to be a part of it. I think another part of it is the economy. With stock prices going up and people being a little freer with cash, maybe pay TV companies like DISH and DIRECTV are willing to pay a little more even when they don’t have to. This probably stops the worst of the fee fights from turning into channel blackouts.
So CBS, CW, Pop, and other networks are back on DISH. That’s great. Of course now those networks have to concentrate on actually providing some new programming, something they’re not famous for during the holiday season. I get it, during the holidays people are going out to parties, interacting face-to-face, that sort of thing. Conventional wisdom says that it’s the wrong time for new programs. Funny, but that’s what they used to say about the summer, too. Also kind of funny, seems like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon haven’t stopped rolling out new content and they’re the darlings of the media world!
Makes you think, doesn’t it?
