Dish Likely to Drop Viacom, Say Citi Analysts
Dish Network likely will drop Viacom in its upcoming carriage renewal, Citi Research analysts emailed investors. Cable One and Suddenlink dropped Viacom channels in 2014. “Most Favored Nation clauses may limit Viacom’s pricing flexibility with Dish without triggering lower affiliate…
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fees from other pay TV firms,” the analysts said Tuesday. They said Viacom might look into selling itself before the renewal with Dish. "We don’t have a renewal with Dish in 2015," Viacom spokesman Jeremy Zweig said Wednesday. He emailed Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman's statements from the company's last earnings call, which said: "In the past 12 months, we have concluded favorable multi-year renewals covering about 25 percent of our total domestic subscribers, including Time Warner Cable, Verizon, more than 800 NCTC [National Cable Television Cooperative] member distributors totaling more than 4.8 million subscribers and most recently Frontier Communications, which has approximately 260,000 subscribers. We now have 70 percent of our subscribers covered by affiliate agreements that won’t expire for at least three years and go out for as long as eight years.” Dish declined to comment on the speculation.