On Thursday, September 7, the up-and-coming Detroit Lions will visit the defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, kicking off the 2023 NFL season.
If what is currently the largest station blackout in America isn't resolved by that time, customers for the third biggest pay TV platform provider in the country, DirecTV, won't be able to watch the game in interested local Chiefs markets like Joplin, Missouri, as well as Wichita and Topeka, Kansas, where three of Nexstar's NBC affiliate stations are located.
Meanwhile, up in Michigan, DirecTV-subscribing Lions fans in Grand Rapids won't be able to watch the game on Nexstar's WOOD-TV, at least not without an over-the-air antenna.
All those crabby snacks and homemades ... for nothin'.
Juxtaposing Nexstar's map of its network affiliates against the earlier NFL regular season schedule, it's obvious that this retrans kerfuffle, which actually started as a sleepy affair back in early July, when little programming of consequence was on the Big Four broadcast networks, is about to get real.
Actually, consider Saturday, August 26, the official start of "gets real," with NBC's presentation of Navy visiting Notre Dame kicking off the 2023 college football season.
Currently, 169 Nexstar Media Group stations are blacked out on DirecTV satellite TV, DirecTV Stream and U-verse TV.
The blackout count of affiliates rises to well over 200 when you factor in long-running disputes between DirecTV and Mission Broadcasting and White Knight Broadcasting, which both contract Nexstar to operate their stations. (DirecTV has taken its beef about that to the FCC.)
Nexstar said DirecTV rejected an earlier offer to keep Nexstar affiliates on its platforms through October while a renewal is hashed out.
DirecTV said that Nexstar's current demands would double the fees the operator previously paid for broadcast retransmission.
In any event, it seems likely -- very probable, in fact -- that the wartime rhetoric between the two companies will ramp up significantly in the coming days.
So how many DirecTV customers will be impacted? Real hard to say.
DirecTV was spun off from AT&T two years ago in a deal with private equity. The last time DirecTV publicly reported subscriber numbers was for the second quarter of 2021, when it disclosed a loss of 473,000 pay TV souls. That was actually a significant deceleration of loss, given that the operator's bleed rate had reached around 13% the year prior.
So after battling the far right over carriage of OAN and Newsmax, losing NFL Sunday Ticket to Google, then embarking on a huge broadcast affiliate blackout with the top station group in the U.S., what does DirecTV's subscriber picture look like now?
According to Leichtman Research Group estimates released Tuesday, DirecTV is still the No. 3 U.S. pay TV operator, with 12.35 million subscribers across its three platforms. It lost around 400,000 subscribers in the second quarter, LRG said.
"I base the estimate on the performance of others in the industry in the quarter, and where DirecTV would likely fit. I relate it to last year’s estimate, and I use consumer research to help ballpark it," principal analyst Bruce Leichtman said to Next TV, in an email explaining his methodology.
