
A major component of the CBS/Dish Network carriage agreement struck over the weekend comes with a deal over Dish’s mass commercial-skipping device, AutoHop.
For CBS,
the agreement means the ad-skipping functionality of AutoHop will not be available for CBS-owned stations during the C7 window — commercial ratings plus seven days of time-shifted viewing
metric.
This is the second major deal Dish has struck in a carriage agreement over AutoHop. Major media companies looked to sue the satellite-delivered pay TV service for copyright
infringement and breach of contract in May 2012. AutoHop could skip massive portions of commercial time of prime-time programming on the four major TV networks.
Last year, Disney was the first
to strike an agreement with Dish over AutoHop. In that deal, Disney-ABC networks negotiated three days of disabled ad-skipping.
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TV networks have been pushing for longer time-shifting deals
with TV advertisers. This past upfront, networks like CBS and ABC made deals beyond their customary C3 guarantees — commercial ratings plus three days of time-shifted viewing — to C7
deals.
The main carriage component part of the deal covers not only CBS-owned stations but CBS-owned channels, such as Smithsonian Channel, TVGN, Showtime and CBS Sports Network.
Financial terms of the agreement have not been disclosed. Analysts have pointed out that CBS and other networks have been looking for carriage agreements between $1 and $2 per subscriber.