– As previously reported, dozens of stations for The CW parent company Nexstar, which carries WWE NXT, have gone dark on Optimum pay TV. This has led to Optimum pulling 63 Nexstar stations off the air, including The CW’s flagship station, WPIX, out of New York City. Optimum has since issued an official statement to 411Mania on the dispute. You can see Optimum’s official statement below:
“Unfortunately, Nexstar is using an anti-consumer negotiation tactic – tying local channels to less popular ones – requiring Optimum and its customers to pay for channels like NewsNation, which has essentially no viewership, in order to continue carrying Nexstar broadcast stations in various markets across the country.
To illustrate the absurdity of this demand, we note that in any given month, 90% of customers – more than 1.2 million – never tune in to NewsNation, making it unfair to force customers to pay tens of millions of dollars for content they never watch and hold them hostage to force carriage of broadcast stations. Despite NewsNation’s shockingly low viewership, Nexstar has taken this one step further by demanding expanded distribution of the channel to hundreds of thousands more customers, requiring that even more customers who don’t watch it are made to pay for it.
Plus, Nexstar is demanding exorbitant rates, the highest of any broadcasting group.
Nexstar’s “all or nothing” approach of price gouging customers by forcing them to pay for content they don’t want and bundling different stations and channels together into the same negotiations – despite their varied programming and audiences across different states – is in no one’s best interest but their own.
Optimum values local programming and understands that viewers in New York do not watch the same content or have the same interests as viewers in Texas, Arkansas, or California, so it is unreasonable, anti-local, detrimental to customers, and unfair for Nexstar to demand unrelated and contrasting content carriage.
We remain open to continued negotiations with Nexstar to reach a fair new deal to restore their programming on Optimum TV lineups. In the meantime, customers who are looking to watch Nexstar-owned content can continue to do so for free over the air with an antenna or visit www.optimum.com/nexstar to learn more about the solutions Optimum is making available.”
Additionally, Optimum has stated that customers can continue to access Nexstar content through Fubo or watch alternative local news content in their Optimum TV lineup.
