HBO blacked out on DISH
Details
Michelle Clancy
| 02 November 2018

HBO and its sister network, Cinemax, has gone dark in the US for DISH satellite subscribers, after a failure to come to terms on a distribution deal.

According to Reuters, about 2.5 million of DISH’s 13 million customers subscribe to the premium cable network and are thus affected.

As in most carriage disputes, it comes down to a he said/she said situation: DISH said that HBO’s carriage fees are exorbitant, while HBO, home of Game of Thrones, Westworld, Big Little Lies, Veep, Silicon Valley, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and other hits, said that DISH is wanting to pay too little.

Further, HBO, which is part of AT&T’s WarnerMedia division following the telco’s acquisition of Time Warner, said it had offered to extend the contract to continue discussions, but that DISH executives declined to negotiate further.

“DISH’s proposals and actions made it clear they never intended to seriously negotiate an agreement,” said Simon Sutton, HBO President and Chief Revenue Officer.

There’s a unique wrinkle to an otherwise run-of-the-mill carriage-dispute issue, however: HBO owner AT&T also owns DirecTV, DISH’s only major satellite TV rival. As such, WarnerMedia has accused the US Department of Justice of “collaborating” with DISH – the two had opposed the AT&T/Time Warner merger.

“The Department of Justice collaborated closely with DISH in its unsuccessful lawsuit to block our merger,” a WarnerMedia spokesman said in a statement. “That collaboration continues to this day with DISH’s tactical decision to drop HBO – not the other way around. DOJ failed to prove its claims about HBO at trial and then abandoned them on appeal.”

Andy LeCuyer, DISH senior vice president of programming, fired back: “The merger created for AT&T immense power over consumers. It seems AT&T is implementing a new strategy to shut off its recently acquired content from other distributors.”