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Dish Chairman Claims Digital Streaming "Devalues" TV Content

Some things never change: media companies and pay TV providers will always wrestle over carriage fees. As All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka points out, the result is always the same, too: the consumer ends up paying more.

 

Nevertheless, the latest spat -- between Dish Networks, a satellite TV provider, and AMC Networks, owner of such shows as “Mad Men,” “The Walking Dead” and “Breaking Bad” -- has taken an interesting twist: Dish claims that because AMC sells certain shows to digital streaming services like Netflix, Apple’s iTunes, and Amazon Prime, its content is worth less to Dish subscribers. 

 

Kafka paraphrases Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen during the company’s Q1 earnings call here: “One of the things that programmers have done is that they’ve devalued their programming content by making it available in many multiple outlets. So, when someone asks for price increases …we just look at it. Our customers are not really saying ‘We want to pay more money,’ they’re saying, ‘We want more flexibility in our programming, and we don’t want to pay more.’”

Read the whole story at All Things Digital »

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