Nexstar Jumps into Smith-Time Warner Cable Dispute
The FCC should force Time Warner Cable to drop some Nexstar and Mission Broadcasting TV signals in markets where Smith Media owns or manages the local station, Nexstar and Mission said in an emergency petition filed with the agency this week. The petition came after Smith and TWC reached an impasse in retransmission consent negotiations covering three northeastern TV stations Dec. 15, and TWC began importing Nexstar and Mission signals to replace them. TWC didn’t properly notify Nexstar, Mission, local subscribers or franchise authorities before adding the out-of-market stations, Nexstar and Mission said in the petitions. They also asked the FCC to immediately give Smith its network non-duplication rights and waive a standard 60-day notice requirement.
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TWC said it will respond to the petition, as required, but otherwise declined to discuss it, beyond saying “we recognize that our customers are caught in the middle of these contract negotiations, and we're doing everything we can to minimize the loss of programming caused by Smith Media pulling its signals from our customers. We are confident in our right to carry WBRE and WUTR and that we've complied with any notice obligations.”
Smith owns or manages WKTV-TV Utica, N.Y., and WVNY Burlington, Vt., which have been dark on TWC cable systems in their designated marketing areas since Dec. 15, affecting about 72,000 pay-TV households, said Vic Vetters, vice president and group manager of Smith Media’s northeastern properties. The stations are still carried under a must-carry arrangement with TWC on systems that are outside the boundaries of the DMA, he said. Smith’s Utica NBC affiliate has been the top rated local station in the market for decades and is the only remaining local broadcast news operation, Vetters said. Now, local TWC subscribers are seeing local news from Nexstar’s Wilkes-Barre-Scranton, Pa., affiliate, he said. “There are snow events here, school closing and snow emergencies, and the viewers have been deprived of that kind of hyper local coverage,” he said.
TWC has told Mission and Nexstar that its retransmission consent contracts give TWC the right to carry their stations on any TWC cable system, according to a letter attached to the petition from Michelle Kim, TWC group vice president and chief counsel of programming. “Nowhere does the agreement impose any geographical limitations on TWC’s carriage rights with regard to the covered stations,” the letter said. “Indeed, if retransmission consent agreements never provided for out-of-market carriage and networks invariably prohibited such grants … then there would be no need for the FCC’s non-duplication rules,” it said. Furthermore the 30-day notice provisions invoked by Nexstar only apply to instances when a cable operator deletes or repositions a station, “neither of which occurred here,” the letter said.
"Apparently, Time Warner does not believe that adding a station to a system more than 100 miles away is repositioning that station on a different channel and worthy of advance notice,” Nexstar and Mission said in the petition. Talks between Smith and TWC have continued since their agreement expired Dec. 15, but little substantive progress has been made, Vetters said. “Clearly the importation of a TV station from 150-200 miles away is challenging and difficult for us, and it shouldn’t have happened that way,” he said.