The nearly month long blackout between News-Press & Gazette and DirecTV is over.
The two companies reached an agreement over retransmission fees this afternoon. Details of the agreement were not disclosed.
While the financial deal seems to be settled, there seems to be some lingering bad feelings between the two companies. In a statement sent to TVSpy, DirecTV said, “News-Press & Gazette has returned its 13 local television stations to DIRECTV customers homes after unnecessarily suspending them for more than two weeks beginning Oct. 9. While we are pleased NPG has restored the stations, we’re equally as frustrated that they took them away in the first place.”
The statement goes on to say, “This is just another unfortunate example of broadcasters violating the public trust in an attempt to extract higher fees from our customers. Given the fact that there has been a record high of 110 broadcaster blackouts in only the first ten months of this year (with more likely to come by year’s end), we continue to ask Congress to intervene and fix this badly broken system that has enabled some stations to use viewers’ loyalty against them rather than reward them for it.”
TVSpy has not been able to contact News-Press & Gazette for comment.