Verizon and Tegna said in a statement that they had reached “a multiyear carriage agreement” that restores stations including WVEC, a local ABC station in Norfolk, and WGRZ, the NBC station in Buffalo, ending an outage that had affected what analysts estimated was about 1 million Verizon customers nationwide. This week, Verizon resolved a separate carriage dispute with Disney, which prevented ESPN and ABC from going dark on Fios customers in numerous markets. Providers such as Charter must pay significant sums to programming companies for the right to distribute their shows and channels. Tribune said as many as 6 million Charter subscribers have lost access to news, weather and traffic from their local broadcast stations as a result of the breakdown. “We’ve offered Spectrum fair market rates … Spectrum has refused our offer and failed to negotiate in a meaningful fashion.”Spectrum is a brand under which Charter markets its services.

Source: Washington Post January 03, 2019 23:26 UTC