Storm Front: Dish, Weather In Spat

Operator Would Be First Big Distributor to Drop Service

By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 5/24/2010 12:01:00 AM

Forecast: a high-pressure system potentially extending into the weekend.

Last week, Dish Network threatened to pull the plug on The Weather Channel after the parties’ carriage agreement expired, a move that would peel off more than 14 million from the network’s 100 million-household reach.

As of 3 p.m. Eastern time last Friday, Dish and The Weather Channel were still deadlocked in negotiations. Their previous deal had expired at 12:01 a.m. ET on May 21.

A day earlier, Dish announced that it planned to replace Weather Channel — which would make it the first major distributor to drop the 28-year-old cable mainstay — with Weather Cast, a 24-hour service produced by WeatherNation LLC, a startup based in Excelsior, Minn.

“Our customers always tell us that the only thing they want in a weather channel is weather reporting,” Dave Shull, Dish Network senior vice president of programming, said in a statement. “We believe The Weather Cast is the best available weather service in America.”

Dish, exhibiting its notoriously hardnosed negotiating tactics, said on a section of its site set up for customers that “our contract with The Weather Channel is expiring and they are demanding unreasonable contract terms that would impact customer pricing. We felt that the pending contract expiration presented an ideal opportunity to respond to feedback from customers who have been asking for better weather programming.”

The page had been removed as of Friday morning.

According to Dish’s previous statement, The Weather Channel “has recently moved away from weather reporting to a mix of movies and other entertainment-focused programming.”

In a statement last Thursday, The Weather Channel said, “Despite negotiations over the past several months, Dish has chosen to be the first distributor to drop The Weather Channel, rather than pay the standard industry rates others in the industry have already agreed to pay … We are disappointed with their decision and hopeful that we can still reach an agreement with Dish Network and bring this highly valued network back to its customers.”