The New York Supreme Court this week affirmed a ruling in DirecTV’s favor in a broadcast-retransmission dispute with Nexstar Media Group and awarded the pay TV company $26.6 million. .
DirecTV originally filed the suit against the broadcast station group in 2019, alleging that in 2015, when it was negotiating retrans for what had been a key NBC affiliate for the Washington, D.C. TV market, Nexstar failed to disclose that the Comcast-owned network was soon going to walk away.
DirecTV said it shouldn’t have had to pay around $10.5 million in retransmission fees in between the time the deal was signed in 2015 and when NBC ended its affiliation agreement with Maryland’s erstwhile WHAG-TV (now WDVM-TV) in February 2016.
DirecTV sued to recoup its retrans money, plus interest. While pay TV companies typically pay millions to the Big Four broadcast networks to carry their signals on their services, independent stations don’t typically get paid.
The New York Supreme Court ruled in favor of DirecTV’s allegations of “fraudulent concealment” back in July of last year, and a New York State appeals court upheld that decision in August.
Nexstar, the appeals court said at the time, “knew that the termination of the NBC affiliation was a fait accompli and intentionally concealed this information from plaintiff.”
Nexstar hasn’t commented on what it will do next, but the station group does still have the right to an appeal, according to documents released this week by the New York Supreme Court.
America’s biggest broadcast station owner, either owning or contracted to manage more than 200 stations in 116 markets serving 220 million viewers, Nexstar’s litigation with El Segundo, Calif.-based DirecTV may not be concluded.
In December, the pay TV company asked an appellate court in Manhattan to revive a 2023 antitrust claim alleging that Irving, Texas-headquartered Nexstar colluded with two other smaller broadcast station owners, Mission Broadcasting and White Knight Broadcasting, to drive up retransmission fees.
A New York federal judge tossed that suit in March 2024, ruling that DirecTV didn’t lose money from illegal price-fixing, but rather its own poor business decisions.
Still rising at a time when the pay TV ecosystem is rapidly eroding, broadcast retransmission fees remain a big source of contentious negotiation in the TV distribution business. S&P Global Market Intelligence estimates that pay TV operators shelled out $22.62 per subscriber on retrans fees in 2024, up about 14% over 2023.