Nexstar Media Group has found itself in the middle of another distribution dispute.
On Friday, customers of Altice USA’s Optimum TV lost access to Nexstar-owned or operated channels like WPIX (Channel 11) in New York, KTLA (Channel 5) in Los Angeles and around five dozen others across the Optimum TV footprint. The Desk was the first to report on Tuesday that Nexstar channels were at risk of being dropped by Optimum.
As is typical with disputes involving broadcasters and cable TV operators, the disagreement centers around fees and other terms that cable providers must agree to for the privilege of carrying local TV stations like those owned by Nexstar.
A spokesperson for Altice USA said Nexstar was using “anti-consumer negotiating tactics” by trying to tie the distribution of their local TV channels to carriage of a cable news channel called NewsNation, “which has essentially no viewership.”
“In any given month, 90 percent of customers – more than 1.2 million – never tune in to NewsNation, making it unfair to force customers to pay tens of millions of dollars for content they never watch and hold them hostage to force carriage of broadcast stations,” the spokesperson said. “Despite NewsNation’s shockingly low viewership, Nexstar has taken this one step further by demanding expanded distribution of the channel to hundreds of thousands more customers, requiring that even more customers who don’t watch it are made to pay for it.”
NewsNation averaged around 110,000 viewers each day in 2024, according to Nielsen ratings reviewed by The Desk. By comparison, the Fox News Channel averaged around 2.47 million viewers each day, with its prime-time shows seeing higher ratings. MSNBC had around 1.2 million viewers, while CNN grabbed 707,000 daily viewers.
While NewsNation’s daily audience might pale in comparison to that of other news networks, its overall viewership is growing, according to year-over metrics reviewed by The Desk. The network’s post-election audience has also increased, with prime-time shows enjoying a 25 percent bump in viewers between early November and mid-December. NewsNation launched in 2021, replacing WGN America on most cable systems, including Optimum.
Nexstar’s local TV channels see higher viewership in part because of major network affiliation deals with ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC. On stations like WPIX and KTLA, affiliated with Nexstar-owned CW, the channels typically produce more local news compared to network-owned stations in those markets, which also drive higher viewership.
For its part, Nexstar said it was seeking a fair market rate in exchange for its channels — something the broadcaster has asserted in prior carriage disputes, including one with DirecTV in 2023.
“Altice has consistently made unreasonable and unprecedented demands of Nexstar, culminating with their decision to walk away from the negotiations,” Michael Biard, Nexstar’s President and Chief Operating Officer, said in a statement late Friday evening. “Unfortunately, this seems to be a regular pattern of behavior for Altice, which dropped the MSG Network just last week, depriving millions of New York sports fans the opportunity to see their favorite teams in action. We understand the difficulty of Altice’s financial situation, burdened as it is by billions in debt, but the solution isn’t to force Optimum subscribers to continually pay more while getting less.”
Like other broadcast station owners, Nexstar has sought higher fees over the past few years to offset headwinds in the advertising market, with distribution fees becoming a bigger part of their business. Those fees drive up the cost of cable and satellite TV services, the distributors say. During its third financial quarter (Q3) of 2024, Nexstar said it earned $719 million in distribution-related revenue, accounting for a sizable portion of its record $1.37 billion income that period.
Optimum says Nexstar is “demanding exorbitant rates, the highest of any broadcast group,” though the company didn’t say how much Nexstar was asking for its channels.
“Optimum values local programming and understands that viewers in New York do not watch the same content or have the same interests as viewers in Texas, Arkansas, or California,” the Optimum spokesperson said. “So, it is unreasonable, anti-local, detrimental to customers, and unfair for Nexstar to demand unrelated and contrasting content carriage.”
Optimum said it was still willing to negotiate a new carriage deal with Nexstar. In the meantime, the company is pointing its cable TV and Internet customers to Fubo as an alternative to watch Nexstar-owned local stations and NewsNation. Nexstar’s broadcast stations can also usually be received for free by using an antenna.
