Dec 30, 2019 | posted by Conner Williams
DirectLink,
along with over 700 rural cable television providers nationwide, are working
with the National Cable Television Collaborative in negotiations with FOX Corporation to renew our agreement to continue to offer FOX News Channel 45,
FOX Business Channel 50, Fox Sports 1 (FS1) Channel 38 and Fox Sports 2 (FS2) Channel
39 to our membership.
Please note: this
does not affect the local FOX KPTV Channel 12 or FOX 12 Plus Channel 13.
As your
local TV provider, we at DirectLink believe you deserve access to these
channels and work hard to keep TV prices as low as possible for our
members. But there’s no denying that programming itself is expensive and
rises every year. Those costs are set by multibillion-dollar TV networks
like FOX Corporation, which is currently holding hundreds of small, independent
cooperatives like DirectLink hostage over significant rate increases
that would be passed on to subscribers. While we understand that the cost
of business can escalate over time, it is our policy to reject vastly increased
retransmission fees for our members.
We
work diligently to keep these prices as low as possible while
offering our TV subscribers a wide array of programming choices. This becomes
more difficult when popular media companies like FOX Corporation demand
price increases that are ten times the rate of inflation. Their goal is to
leverage the popularity of their family of channels listed above to raise costs
for their programming at an unreasonable rate that would directly impact
monthly bills.
We have
been working in good faith to reach a mutual agreement that
would allow us to keep the FOX family of cable
channels and minimize member affecting increases. However,
if an agreement is not reached by midnight on Tuesday, December 31,
FOX Corporation may remove these channels from your TV lineup as a
bargaining chip until negotiations are complete.
Please
understand that discontinuing any of these channels temporarily or permanently
is not our wish and will only occur as a last resort should all other
negotiations fail. If this should happen, know that we will continue to work
toward an amicable solution for our members to reinstate the channels as
quickly as possible at the best available rate.
We
encourage our members to continue the conversation and to learn more at www.TVOnMySide.com/DirectLink.
Go back to news feed.