Proving that picking up the phone can indeed be useful, the CBS blackout that resulted as a result of a feud between Dish Network and the network has finally come to an end. On Thanksgiving, Dish announced that it had reached “a multi-year carriage agreement with CBS Corporation for its owned and operated local stations, as well as CBS Sports Network, Pop, and Smithsonian Channel.” As a result, channels were restored to Dish customers, because you can’t really be thankful over the holidays without access to CBS channels, right?
While the terms of the agreement weren’t disclosed, Warren Schlichting, Dish executive vice president of Marketing, Programming, and Media Sales noted in a statement, “We are grateful to our customers for their patience this holiday week as months of work has resulted in a deal that delivers CBS for years to come.”
The agreement comes days after customers were told to put the turkey baster down and pick up the phone to call some local businesses. In an effort to end its stalled negotiations over a carriage agreement and end the CBS blackout, Dish Network urged folks to call companies that advertise on local CBS networks.
On Dish Network’s dishpromise.com website, the United States’ No. 2 satellite operator showed customers how their local CBS stations were affected by the dispute, which left CBS blacked out to Dish subscribers in dozens of states. After inputting your ZIP code, you could scrolled down to the Make Your Voice Heard section, where Dish listed all of the local businesses advertising on specific CBS channels.
The CBS blackout affected cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, San Francisco, Boston, Tampa, Seattle, Minneapolis, Detroit, Miami, Denver, Sacramento, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh.
Besides rallying the TV remote soldiers, the dishpromise.com site offered a glimpse into Dish and CBS’s tense negotiations. On the site, Dish alleges CBS is asking the satellite operator to pay “more than 50 percent higher than what we currently pay to carry this channel.” Dish doesn’t share exactly how much it pays CBS to retransmit its channels, but CBS’s CEO Les Moonves estimated the network charges traditional cable companies $2 per subscriber at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia media conference earlier this year.
Warren Schlicting, Dish’s executive vice president of marketing and programming, recorded a video featured on the site that explains how the company’s carriage dispute with CBS is a microcosm of a larger, fractured relationship between broadcasters and pay-TV providers. “The fees CBS and other broadcasters charge pay-TV providers, like Dish, to carry local channels is up an incredible 1,700 percent. That’s 17 times what it was just a decade ago.”
For now, however, the drama appears to be over.
Update: CBS blackout ends for Dish customers.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.