Tuesday, September 18, 2012

CBS threatens to pull stations off Dish

Les Moonves, the President of CBS has publicly threatened to pull CBS-owned stations from Dish Network carriage if Dish continues with plans to offer an option that would remove commercials from its new Hopper DVR service.  A key feature of the Hopper service is that it will automatically record all prime-time programming from the Big Four networks and offers subscribers the option to activate the AutoHop feature, which will automatically drop ads and other non-programming content from the playback.
"Hopper cannot exist," Moonves said Wednesday at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference in Beverly Hills, Calif. "We cannot produce episodes for $3.5 million apiece and have the people at Dish say they will pull out the commercials. We will not be on Dish. We will go elsewhere," he added.
CBS is also part of the Big Four networks' legal challenge that charges Dish with copyright infringement.  The case joins a number of others that question whether a number of new digital services operate under "fair use" guidelines or run afoul of one or more intellectual property rights.

  The move could impact on CBS audiences and ratings, if its viewers don't have alternative ways of receiving the signals of the pulled stations.  It could also encourage Dish viewers who want to keep access to CBS programming to shift to an alternative service.  CBS-owned stations tend to be in the largest markets, where competition for multichannel video services is high, so viewers should have options.  Both CBS and Dish are likely to experience some negative impact in the short run, while the legal case is in the early stages.  The real impact will come if another major network or station owner follows CBS' lead.

Read more: CBS threatens to pull stations from Dish over Hopper dispute - FierceCable

1 comment:

  1. That sounds like a strange move to me, but everything Les does shows just how behind the times he is. Working for DISH, I know that part of the monthly fees that I and every other DISH customer pay goes to CBS, NBC, FOX and ABC as retransmission fees. So why would Les be willing to cut off 14 million paying customers for things everyone does with their DVR. DISH didn’t reinvent the wheel, they just made things that we all use DVRs for a little easier to do. I use Auto Hop because I only get 3 or 4 hours a week to watch TV, but 20 minutes of every hour I watch is filled with commercials. I would prefer that time to be used for my shows and not for products I don’t buy.

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