UPDATE: September 5th, 7:35pm CST
Raycom Media has worked all day to get a deal done and offered to continue into the night. DirecTV admitted it only needs under 2 hours to get Raycom back on the air so why are they walking away from the discussions now? Call them and ask… We have an offer on the table and will be here all night if needed to hear back from DirecTV.
We Live Here
Over the years we value that you have come to rely on KSLA News 12. We value your loyalty, and we regret that our service has been interrupted for some of our viewers. There is a lot of noise and half-truths in the media about the situation with DirecTV. Please bear with us while we give you more background on what's really happening.
As a local broadcaster, we have a longstanding special relationship with the Ark La Tex that we have been serving for 60 years. We have teams of people dedicated to providing local news, weather, sports and entertainment 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. You know a lot of those people. While DirecTV, located in Los Angeles, may not think too much about dropping KSLA from their service, it's a big deal to us- we live here.
The Economics of KSLA
Our economics are simple. We invest heavily in the content that makes KSLA great. That includes local programming, like hours and hours of local news and weather and top tier national programming from our network, which costs us much more today than it did three years ago. We offer all of this programming at no cost to you in its entirety, 24/7/365 over the air and on our digital platforms.
In addition to offering our programming over the air, online and on mobile devices, we also provide it to pay TV providers for a small fee per month. This dispute is about what that fee is for DirecTV. We offer some of the best sports and entertainment programming on TV, like NFL and College Football, NCIS, The Big Bang Theory and 6 hours/day of top quality news and weather coverage from the Ark La Tex. All of that comes at a cost, and those costs increase over time. In fact the cost of our network programming has more than doubled every year on average for the last three years.
We are asking DirecTV to cover their fair share of those increases, like any business would, since our last deal with them is 3 years old. But you deserve to know that what we are asking for is a fraction of what DIRECT TV pays some cable networks that are not nearly as popular in the Ark La Tex. In an average hour, 20% of the Ark La Tex viewing audience watches KSLA. DirecTV pays other content providers that have a much smaller audience 4x more than what we are asking for. Said another way, DirecTV pays certain cable networks four times what we are asking for, while those same cable networks have a fraction of our audience! DirecTV doesn't understand why KSLA is so important to the ArkLaTex. Why else wouldn't they be willing to pay a fair price?
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