DirecTV blacks out Las Vegas station during contract dispute

For at least the third time in the past eight years, KLAS-TV, Channel 8, has gone dark for some local viewers because of a contract dispute.

The local CBS affiliate was removed from DirecTV and DirecTV Stream at 4 p.m. Sunday after the company didn’t reach a new deal with Channel 8’s owner, Nexstar. At the heart of the dispute are retransmission fees, the money local stations charge cable and satellite providers to air the same content that’s available for free on apps or over the air via an antenna.

“Nexstar has a long track record of forcing programming outages in an effort to unnecessarily raise prices for everyone at the expense of the communities they are licensed and entrusted to serve,” Rob Thun, chief content officer of DirecTV, said in a statement. “We will continue to work with Nexstar to reach an agreement and will take all necessary actions to provide our customers access to their favorite programming while protecting them from unwarranted price increases.”

The Irving, Texas-based Nexstar is the largest owner of local TV stations in the country, with 159 stations serving 113 markets.

“Nexstar has been negotiating tirelessly and in good faith in an attempt to reach a mutually agreeable multi-year contract with DirecTV since May, offering the same fair market rates it offered to other distribution partners with whom it completed successful negotiations in the past year,” the company countered in its own statement.

DirecTV also removed the Nexstar-owned cable news channel NewsNation.

Since acquiring Channel 8 in 2015, Nexstar has been involved in similar carriage disputes.

In 2019, a disagreement between Nexstar and DirecTV kept the channel away from local subscribers from July 3 till the end of August.

And in early 2016, a dispute between Nexstar and Cox Communications resulted in Channel 8 being knocked off the local cable system for five days and threatened access to Super Bowl 50.