In the latest battle over retransmission agreements, Fox warned its viewers over the weekend that DirecTV subscribers could lose access to 26 Fox local affiliates and its sports networks if the two don’t reach an agreement by the time their contract expires at midnight, Dec. 2. The blackout would not affect Fox News and Fox Business News. 

“Despite our best efforts for months, we regret that DirecTV continues to demand unprecedented special treatment that represents a wholesale change to our long-standing relationship and is out of step with marketplace term,” the company said in a statement, which also began running crawls about the potential blackout across its live programming Sunday night. 

Fox noted that the blackout could occur at the height of the college football and NFL seasons as well as the World Cup, of which Fox Sports is the host broadcaster for the U.S. If an agreement is not reached, viewers of DirecTV’s satellite service and its streaming services, DirecTV Stream and U-Verse, would be impacted.

For its part, DirecTV claimed it was working diligently to prevent such an occurrence. 

“At this point, any interruption of Fox programming depends solely on Fox alone,” DirecTV said in a statement. “DirecTV has no intention to remove any Fox content. The best way for everyone to “Keep Fox” is for Fox to keep making it available themselves. We’re working hard to reach an agreement to renew these Fox stations and national sports channels so customers can continue to enjoy them at a strong value. Based on our excellent track record with Fox, we’re confident we’ll come to terms ahead of any potential disruption. In fact, we’ve renewed nearly 200 local FOX stations much like these over the last few years.

Unfortunately, the same old, tired programmer scare tactics of putting customers into the middle of contract renewals tend to die hard,” the statement continued. “Fox invented this tactic back at the turn of the century, and has a long, long history of aggravating consumers to help try to boost their guaranteed rates, while most renewals are typically resolved without any interruptions.”

The American Television Alliance, a pay-TV advocacy group, condemned Fox for its timely actions, blaming broadcasters of raising retrans fees by more than 1500% since 2010 and accusing the network for making similar recent threats with other distributors like Roku and the National Cable Television Cooperative. 

"During Thanksgiving Weekend, when families are spending time together watching their favorite teams, Fox decided to ruin their day by threatening to cut off their service if their rate increase demands are not met,” said ATVA spokesperson Jessica Kendust. “Fox is using the peak season for their key live sports like college football’s Rivalry Weekend, NFL’s Thanksgiving holiday weekend coverage, and the beginning of World Cup as a weapon to drive up prices for their networks.

“The retransmission consent market should behave like any other market—extraordinary performance will lead to increased compensation—but the opposite is true here,” Kendust added. “Stations continue to lose viewers, and then advertisers, and so they wait until programming is at its short-term peak to threaten or carry out service disruptions. Unfortunately, these tactics will continue until Congress steps in to make much-needed reform to these outdated TV laws.”

Fox Network Group reached a new long-term carriage deal with AT&T.The deal comes as AT&T is fighting a U.S. Justice Department appeal of a court’s decision to approve AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner.

The new deal covers retransmission consent for Fox TV stations in 17 cities and 22 Fox-owned regional sports networks. It also includes cable networks FS1, FS2, FX, FXX, FXM, National Geographic Channel, Nat Geo Wild, BabyTV, and Spanish-language services Fox Deportes, Nat Geo Mundo and Fox Life, as well as the Fox Soccer Plus pay-per-view service.

AT&T’s video platforms include DirecTV, DirecTVNow and AT&T U-verse.

“We are pleased to have closed a multi-year deal with Fox for their entire array of content. Our customers will continue to enjoy their programming live and on-demand on all their devices, both at home and on-the-go,” said Daniel York, chief content officer and senior executive VP for AT&T Communications. “Fox has worked with us in this deal to deliver more choice for consumers and better value to AT&T customers.”

Financial terms were not disclosed.

“We’re pleased to expand our partnership with AT&T through this wide-ranging agreement which ensures that our top-rated entertainment and sports programming will remain broadly available to DirecTV, DirecTVNow and U-Verse customers for the foreseeable future,” said Mike Biard, Fox Networks Group president of distribution.

Rival distributors have complained that the combination of AT&T’s distribution businesses—including DirecTV—and the Time Warner programming assets, such as Turner’s TNT, CNN, Cartoon Network and HBO—give it an unfair advantage.

Settling with Fox relatively quietly helps AT&T with its current dispute with Dish Network.

Dish Network in November blacked out HBO, which is now part of AT&T’s WarnerMedia unit. Dish is claiming that AT&T is planning to sell HBO programming to subscribers at lower prices than it is charging Dish and intends to use its control of HBO to steal subscribers,

“Plain and simple, the merger created for AT&T immense power over consumers,” said Andy LeCuyer, Dish senior VP of programming. “It seems AT&T is implementing a new strategy to shut off its recently acquired content from other distributors.

In October, John Donovan, head of AT&T’s communications unit, said the company would be reviewing its pay TV programming lineups. Its DirecTV satellite unit is losing subscribers and the company is looking to skinnier streaming bundles as a way to attract consumers and bolster its wireless business.

“We’re evaluating our channel lineups and taking a fresh look at how we can align content cost with the price,” Donovan said.

Analyst Douglas Mitchelson of Credit Suisse noted that AT&T had pay TV renewals coming up with Fox, CBS, Viacom and Disney and possibly other programmers.

“Whether [AT&T] will be willing to outright drop network groups to achieve its ambitions will be closely watched," Mitchelson said in a research note.

AT&T’s Donovan said that the company is going to realign its video products in 2019.

“We’re refining our four video products, tailoring them to customer needs,” he said.

Fox is in the process of selling its entertainment cable networks—FX, FXX, National Geographic Channel—and its TV and movie studios to the Walt Disney Co. 

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND—Barefoot Networks and Fox Networks are demonstrating the application of Barefoot’s 6.5Tb/s Tofino switch ASIC and P4 language for use in broadcast media networks at the EBU Network Seminar, June 19-20.

The demonstration shows how Barefoot's P4-programmable forwarding plane technology and Tofino-powered switch enable the forward plane to perform packet processing functions to parse SMPTE ST 2110-20 headers and dynamically compose video from output that is switched using Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) timestamp and video row number.

"As broadcast media transmission increasingly becomes packetized with Live IP technology, having a programmable forwarding plane is crucial for enabling a rich set of network applications," said Thomas Edwards, vice president of engineering and development at Fox Networks. "With Tofino and P4, we've been able to implement custom forwarding plane functions to make intelligent switching decisions on media streams by looking into packet headers and applying rules that enable us to increase the performance and efficiency of our IP production infrastructure."

Programmable forward plane technology enables complete switch flexibility in terms of manipulating packets and making forwarding decisions. P4-programmable forwarding planes make possible use-cases that are not possible with fixed-function switching silicon, Barefoot Networks said.

This enables users to create simple and scalable packet processing pipelines to meet their specific needs. Products such as Barefoot’s Tofino make it possible for network owners and operators to build new functions and features at the forwarding plane-level and thus derive more value from their networks.

The EBU Network Technology Seminar demo builds on last year’s presentation, which showed how Fox Networks used a Barefoot Tofino switch. For this year’s demo, Fox Networks used the open-source P4 program to implement the forward plane logic. It is open-sourcing its P4 code for other use cases, including RTP header field-based packet forwarding and load balancing as well as Network Address Translation to multicast-replicated packets.

The demo is being supported by open networking experts at STORDIS, which is supplying a 64-port 100GB bare-metal switch powered by the 6.5Tb/s capacity Tofino ASIC.

EBU NTS is taking place June 19-20 from 8:30 a.m. till 6 p.m. at L'Ancienne-Route 17A, CH-1218 Grand Saconnex, Geneva. The demo can be seen at the STORDIS table in the Courchevel room on the 1st floor.

More information is available on the Barefoot Networks website. 

STOCKHOLM—Three new HD channels are being launched by Fox Networks Group Middle East with playout, media management and global distribution help from Ericsson, per a new multi-year contract. Launched within the last month, Fox Crime, Fox Life and Fox Rewayat broadcast 24 hours a day from Ericsson’s broadcast and media service hub in Abu Dhabi.

Ericsson will encode the channels for distribution across Fox’s global affiliate network from its broadcast and media services hubs in Abu Dhabi and Hilversum, using Ericsson’s secure internet distribution platform.

Fox Crime is dedicated to crime and investigation and will feature reality and drama programing. Fox Life will offer programing on food, home and wellness specific to the Middle East. Fox Rewayat is Fox Network’s first ever Arabic language channel.

These three new channels join seven other Fox Network channels managed by Ericsson at its Abu Dhabi hub, including Fox Movies, Fox, Fox Star Movies, Star World, Fox Action Movies, Fox Family Movies and FX.

BURLINGTON, ONTARIO—Evertz and Fox Networks Groups have announced that they have joined the Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS). AIMS’ goal is to foster the adoption of common standards for delivery and distribution of video, audio and metadata over IP.

Both Fox and Evertz have said they will pledge to support the initiative of the Video Service Forum (VSF) on TR-03 that looks to standardize the transport of media through identifying a common interface and protocol to be adopted by all equipment vendors.

Evertz is also one of the main companies that support the ASPEN framework of IP, but the company says that it supports all efforts to create an industry standard. “We look forward to contributing to the process of standardization within VSF/SMPTE to meet the needs of all aspects of the broadcast chain, including the next generation facilities that implement virtualization and cloud services,” said Rakesh Patel, CTO of Evertz.