CTAM: Carriage Spats Won't Go Away, Nets Concede

Panelists says that escalating prices drive innovation to circumvent the process

By Andrea Morabito -- Broadcasting & Cable, 10/15/2012 6:24:58 PM

The carriage fights with content providers that are becoming commonplace in the cable industry are unfortunately not going anywhere, panelists conceded at a CTAM Summit session Monday afternoon.

"It's a model that's not working exactly right, right now," Judy Meyka, executive VP of programming at the National Cable Television Cooperative, said. "There are problems. There's a lot more to come."

DirecTV VP of programming acquisitions Dan Hartman added: "It's unfortunate, but we spend as much time prepping for the battle as getting the deal done. That's a bad place to be."

Part of the hang-up is the escalating prices, which sometimes see cable operators being asked to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fees for broadcast channels that were free 10 years ago. That's bound to drive innovation to circumvent the process, whether through services like Aereo or mobile DTV, one panelist said.

"For that kind of money somebody will figure out a dongle that works pretty well and it will flatten out the negotiations again," Allan Singer, senior VP of programming for Charter Communications, said. "I understand that things have changed and they now have a dual revenue stream, but these negotiations are just not working."

Andrew Rosenberg, senior VP of content acquisition for Time Warner Cable said one silver lining he sees, at least for MVPDs, is that since disruptions are across the industry, running to a competing distributor is not a great option for the consumer anymore.

"Everybody's customers are getting trained that this is part of the landscape," he said. "The programming community is going be a lot more reluctant to weather disruption if it's not going to have an effect on the distributor. There is an opportunity for things to settle down."

One reason the discussions are harder these days is the importance of TV Everywhere to each of the negotiating parties. While TV Everywhere doesn't mean an equal experience for all networks (for example, news or sports don't on a time-delay basis, but it's fine for an HBO Go), it is equally important to everyone now.

 "A few years ago it was a maybe. Now this is important to all of us in different way than it was a few years ago," Rosenberg said. "I think most programmers now come to the table assuming that TV Everywhere is part of the deal."

Added Singer: "It's the slowest part of the deal now because it's all new," because sorting through issues of technology, security and consumer privacy all take time.