TV dispute preventing some Seattleites from watching US Open this weekend

All KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson wants to do for this Father’s Day weekend is spend time with his family and watch the U.S. Open.

“I may not get to do that this weekend,” Dori said. “In fact, it looks like right now I won’t because I’m a Dish Network customer. And Dish Network is in a dispute with Tribune, which owns Q13 Fox. So right now Q13 is blacked out.”

“I’m ticked off because I’m a customer and I pay $130 a month,” he said. “The only thing I use my TV for on Father’s Day weekend is watching eight hours of US Open — I record it (and watch it later) so I can be a good father.”

Dori put that frustration to good use and talked with both companies on his show Friday afternoon. Dish Network and Tribune Media Company have a disagreement over fees — Tribune wants to charge Dish a higher fee than the satellite company wants to pay. The result is that about 5 million Dish customers do not currently have access to any of Tribune’s channels.

“We’ve offered Dish a 60 day extension, we’ve repeatedly offered that to them,” said Gary Weitman, communications director for Tribune. “And unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be getting us anywhere … Dish kind of has a track record of doing this stuff and they’ve done it now 13 times in the last three years. They did it yesterday with the NFL Network forcing them off the air.”

Weitman says his company is encouraging Dish customers to call the satellite company and complain about the channel blackout. He says that Dish hasn’t even negotiated with them, which is why they find Dish’s current desire to go into arbitration over the issue suspicious. Weitman says that Dish has not complied with the results of past arbitration with other companies. He says that if Dish will take the 60 day extension, Seattle viewers can watch the U.S. Open. Otherwise, Tribune would like to go to the FCC to mediate the matter.

Dish’s side of the story

Dish argues otherwise and calls Tribune’s 60-day extension a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

“That would have extended the contract to August 31 which would put us right at the beginning of NFL season — if we weren’t able to get to a deal it would be the maximum pain point for our customers,” said Dish Executive Vice President Stanton Dodge.

Dodge said that Dish offered its own extension — for two days — while the Tribune channels were still on their network. He said that a deal shouldn’t take long to come to — but they want to do it their way.

“They claim they want a fair market rate, and that’s all we want, too,” Dodge said. “We are willing to do that deal, what we propose is to let a third party decide what is a fair rate.”

In the meantime, Dish is offering to allow customers to watch the U.S. Open on a Spanish-speaking sports channel, or provide them with an antenna. In Seattle, Q13 can be picked up for free over the air. Both of those options sound like a hassle to Dori.

“We are trying to get you what you want,” Dodge told Dori. “We fight every day with greedy broadcasters like Tribune who are asking for three times what we pay them today … we are not paying other broadcasters three times what we are paying Tribune today.”

So what is Dori left with?

“Tell ya what, let’s get an antenna to your house,” Dodge said.

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