Gobble Hobble: Dish, Nexstar Warn Of Wednesday Retrans Impasse

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At 2pm Eastern on Thanksgiving Day, many Americans were preparing their very first holiday turkey dinners, or perhaps engaged in multi-household Zoom chats while keeping an eye on National Football League game coverage.


For Colorado-based Dish, the moment was seemingly appropriate to lob a stink bomb in the direction of the nation’s largest broadcast TV station owner, accusing it of setting the stages for the “largest local station blackout in TV history.”

Twenty-four hours later, Nexstar Media Group — the TV station owner fingered by Dish — digested the giblet-filled missive from Dish and responded with its own accusatory statement, noting that Dish was putting its consumers at risk of losing both local and network programming during the pandemic.

With that, one of the biggest retransmission consent negotiation failures ever could transpire on Wednesday (12/2), leaving Dish subscribers in Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. unable to view their local CW Network affiliate.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

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