Dish Network has alerted it satellite subscribers of an upcoming price increase as the company continues to battle with programmers over carriage and retransmission fees.
The company said on its website that prices for many of its channel packages will go up $5 per month starting November 16 and blamed the increase on rising programming costs. TV Answer Man’s Phillip Swann pointed out that this is the second price increase this year for Dish, which raised its rates in January.
“At Dish, we continue to invest in your service and technology to make improvements and provide you with the best TV viewing experience at the best value. However, the price that we pay for programming continues to rise. In fact, the fastest growing cost we and all other TV providers have is driven by the cost we pay the programmers. We will continue to work hard for fair deals with these programmers to keep channel costs and the price you pay as low as possible. Unfortunately, you may have observed some channel interruptions because of this,” the company wrote.
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Dish Network’s price hike comes as the satellite operator—which also runs Sling TV, which raised its prices in July—is embroiled in several carriage disagreements with broadcasters. The company has reached agreed to a few extensions with Sinclair as they continue negotiating a new carriage deal, which could include a return of the Bally Sports regional sports networks (formerly Fox Sports) to Dish TV.
However, Dish Network’s dispute with Tegna is not progressing nearly as amicably. This week, Dish filed a bad faith complaint with the FCC against Tegna, alleging the broadcaster has made unreasonable demands.
This behavior negatively impacts Dish subscribers, and we expect Tegna’s bad behavior to only get worse as the programmer looks to sell its stations to the highest bidder. As a result, we have filed a formal complaint with the FCC to address Tegna’s blatant disregard of the Commission’s rules,” said Andy LeCuyer, Dish’s senior vice president of programming, in a statement.
Tegna responded to Dish’s complaint and called it “utterly baseless and without merit.”
“Tegna welcomes a chance for the FCC to review Dish’s conduct over the course of this negotiation. Perhaps a close examination of Dish’s conduct will cause them to come to the table to negotiate free from their consistently unproductive tactics and public misrepresentations,” the company said in a statement. “The real issue at hand is the need for Dish to stop short-changing their customers by serially dropping valued stations and instead reach fair, market-based deals with programmers like Tegna.”