TV blackout wars in a quiet period

The TV industry has a holiday tradition straight out of "How The Grinch Stole Christmas:" End of year feuds that lead to channel blackouts for viewers. But this year, everybody is playing nice. (It's almost as if the hearts of television executives have collectively grown three sizes.)

At issue are the carriage fees that distributors like Comcast and DirecTV (the biggest cable and satellite providers in the United States, respectively) have to pay to carry cable channels. They regularly have to re-negotiate fees with programmers like The Walt Disney Company, which controls ESPN and ABC Family, and Viacom, which owns MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central. Talks tend to get heated toward the end of the year -- but evidently not in 2013. Come Jan 1, there could be scattered blackouts of local television stations due to what are known as retransmission consent negotiations. Distributors have to pay local stations for the right to carry them, and occasionally the negotiations get so testy that the stations go dark for a period of time. The CBS affiliate in Hartford, Connecticut is warning of a possible blackout in Cablevision homes and the Fox affiliate in Oakland (CA) is warning of the same in Charter homes, to name two examples. But these disputes usually get settled before the self-imposed deadlines.

[Dec 27]