CBS reaches agreement with DISH after going dark

CBS Corporation and DISH Network announced Saturday that they reached an agreement after weeks of negotiations on rebroadcasting fees that led to CBS going dark on DISH Friday night in more than a dozen cities.

"We are very pleased with this deal, which meets all of our economic and strategic objectives," Ray Hopkins, president of television networks distribution for CBS, said in a statement. "We look forward to having DISH as a valued partner for many years to come."

"We are pleased to continue delivering CBS programming to our customers, while expanding their digital access to Showtime content through Showtime Anytime," said Warren Schlichting, DISH senior vice president for programming.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

On Friday, CBS, the parent company of CBSNews.com, announced that as of 7 p.m. ET programming was no longer available to Dish subscribers in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, Dallas, Denver, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh and several other markets.

CBS and Dish had been locked in negotiations for weeks, twice extending talks in hopes of thrashing out a deal.

The dispute was the latest in a series of clashes in recent years between broadcasters and pay-TV distributors over so-called carriage fees - the fees cable and satellite TV providers pay to rebroadcast programming. Networks want a good deal for their content, with carriage fees seen as an important way to generate revenue growth. On the other side, pay-TV companies are eager to keep costs down.

Not surprisingly, those diverging interests often end in brinkmanship -- and sometimes a blackout.

Earlier this year, for example, DirecTV (DTV) subscribers lost access to The Weather Channel because of a dispute over retransmission fees. In 2013, Time Warner Cable (TWC) dropped CBS' signal in several major markets around the country before the sides eventually struck a new deal.

TV distributors have also periodically threatened to stop carrying the signals of ABC (DIS), Fox (FOXA) and other content providers, although typically an agreement is reached that prevents a blackout.

Carriage fees are a growing source of profit for media companies. SNL Kagan estimates that media companies will earn $7.2 billion in such fees by 2019, up from $3.3 billion last year.