Arkansas DirecTV and AT&T U-verse viewers are not seeing KARK-TV, Channel 4, or any other Nexstar Media Group stations on their satellite or cable-TV menus.
In fact, viewers nationwide using U-verse and AT&T’s DirecTV and DirecTV Now services nationwide have been without Nexstar programming since the chain’s 120 TV stations in 97 markets went dark when the current agreement with AT&T expired at midnight July 3.
“Prior to expiration, Nexstar offered a 30-day unconditional extension through Aug. 2 for ATT/DirecTV to continue carrying our stations while we continued negotiations,” said Elizabeth Ryder, executive vice president and general counsel for Nexstar, a publicly traded chain based in Irving, Texas.
Ryder responded to questions about the service interruption in an email exchange with Arkansas Business. “AT&T/DirecTV chose to remove the stations. On July 5, we re-offered the 30-day extension with a full 30 days through Aug. 5. AT&T/DirecTV has chosen not to accept that offer and restore service. We were surprised at their initial rejection and continue to be surprised by their refusal to put the stations back on while we continue negotiations.”
For its part, AT&T referred questions to a company statement, and directed viewers to the same explanation on its tvpromise.com website: “We had hoped to prevent Nexstar from removing its stations from your TV channel lineup,” the web message said. “We even offered Nexstar more money to keep their stations available. However, Nexstar simply said no and chose to remove them instead. By doing so, Nexstar has put you in the center of negotiations.”
The site did not note Nexstar’s offer to keep programming available during negotiations. In describing what it called “the Nexstar playbook,” AT&T said the chain commonly “pulls or threatens to pull their stations from the customers of TV providers to increase fees for stations far beyond their value.” It said NBC, ABC, FOX and CBS have lost “about half their primetime audience over the past few years. Despite this, Nexstar is demanding the largest increase that AT&T has ever seen from any content provider.”
Nexstar’s stations are scattered across the nation in markets large and small, including San Francisco; Portland, Oregon; and Indianapolis. By law, chains like Nexstar have exclusive control over which customers in their service areas can receive the networks they carry, regardless of TV provider, so just switching to a different NBC station isn’t an option for KARK fans watching U-verse in central Arkansas.
“Negotiations are on-going,” said Ryder, the Nexstar executive in Texas. “If resolution is not reached before, later this week our negotiating team — including our CEO [Perry A. Sook] — will be heading to LA for face-to-face negotiations.”
She said many issues go beyond pricing. “We hope for an expedient resolution but cannot predict when a new contract will be reached.”
Nexstar said in a news release that it offered AT&T “the same rates it offered to other large distribution partners,” and that it had successfully renewed more than 390 distribution agreements with cable providers in the past 20 months alone.