satellite pay television service DirecTV will fall An American News Network (OAN) when the right-wing channel’s current carriage contract expires, likely a critical blow to OAN’s audience and finances.
About 90% of the right-wing network’s revenue came from a contract with AT&T’s television platforms, including DirecTV and U-verse. Reuters reported in October 2021, citing the 2020 sworn testimony of an NAO accountant. DirecTV is the largest network distributor, reported the Wall Street Journal.
“We have informed Herring Networks that, following a routine internal review, we do not plan to enter into a new contract when our current agreement expires,” DirecTV said in a statement to USA TODAY.
A DirecTV spokesman would not say when OAN parent company Herring Networks’ contract with DirecTV expires. But Bloomberg, who first reported on DirecTV’s plan to eliminate OAN, said the contract ends in early April.
OAN and Henning Networks did not immediately respond to a USA TODAY request for comment.
OAN will also be removed from DirecTV Stream, the live TV subscription service launched as AT&T TV in 2020.
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The network began appearing on DirecTV in April 2017. Many carriage agreements have a term of 5 years.
The NAO has been criticized for continuing to question President Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, The New York Times reported, and has also maintained that the rioters in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol were activists with the left-wing Antifa movement.
In your story of November 23, 2021 on the network, the Times noted that OAN correspondent Pearson Sharp said in a report from March 28, “There are still serious questions about who really is the president.”
The former president said in an interview at OAN on Friday, “I got 75 million votes… I got more votes than any sitting president in our nation’s history. I don’t think I got 80 million votes. Is that okay?”
DirecTV has also had its problems. In February 2021, AT&T spun off the service, which it acquired for $48.5 billion in 2015. DirecTV’s subscriber count has fallen from 20.5 million in mid-2015 to 15.4 million for all of AT&T’s pay-TV services six years later, according to Leichtman Research. .
AT&T currently owns 70% of the separate company that is now DirecTV; private equity firm TPG owns 30%.
And merger talks between DirecTV and Dish Network, the other major satellite pay-TV service, have resurfaced. The New York Post reported. The two have discussed the merger in the past, but federal regulatory concerns prevented talks from gaining momentum.
But this time it could be different, with consumer acceptance and an emphasis on streaming TV. A possible merger is more likely now than in the past, according to LightShed Partners, a television, media and technology industry research firm. “We believe that the regulatory risks today are not high given the state of the pay TV market,” they said in their list of industry predictions for 2022.
Follow Mike Snider on Twitter: @mikesnider.
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism