Some Panthers fans could miss out on NFL games on TV this week
Carolina Panthers fans who subscribe to satellite TV provider Dish Network will be glad that Sunday is a bye week for their favorite NFL team.
That’s because they may have been blocked from watching NFL games on local Fox affiliate WJZY because of a contract dispute between Dish Network and the station’s parent company, Nexstar Media Group.
At 7 p.m. Wednesday, Dish Network removed WJZY and 163 other Nexstar-owned stations from its system, Nexstar officials said.
Panthers fans, however, have an option to watch the team’s games, NFL on Sunday nights, as well as local news without switching TV providers: a digital antenna.
The Panthers are off this week and will host the Denver Broncos on Sunday, Dec. 13. That game is scheduled to air on CBS affiliate WBTV.
The Dish-Nexstar imbroglio follows a similar dispute this week between satellite provider DirecTV and Tegna Inc., which owns Charlotte NBC affiliate WCNC.
Fans and enemies of the now-11-0 Pittsburgh Steelers — an awful lot of Steelers fans live around here now — couldn’t watch Wednesday’s 19-14 win over the Baltimore Ravens on WCNC if they subscribed to DirecTV.
Such contract disputes have become an annual ritual among such media giants, leaving viewers of all types of shows in the lurch.
Since July, Dish Network has blocked Charlotte ABC affiliate WSOC-TV from its lineup in a dispute with station owner Cox Media Group.
The Dish-Nexstar dispute involves retransmission fees, The (Raleigh) News & Observer reported. Dish Network, AT&T and Charter Spectrum “pay cable networks and TV station owners a monthly license fee to carry their signals,” according to the newspaper.
Nexstar issued a news release on Wednesday insisting the company has negotiated “tirelessly” with Dish Network since July to reach a multiyear contract. Nexstar said it has offered Dish “the same fair market rates it offered to other large distribution partners with whom it completed successful negotiations in 2019 and 2020.”
In a news release, Dish TV President Brian Neylon said Nexstar rejected his company’s “fair offer to keep Nexstar stations available to our customers.”
Meanwhile, we couch potatoes suffer.
This story was originally published December 3, 2020 at 6:11 PM.