AMC could pay heavily for DISH squabble
June 5, 2012
By Chris Forrester
American Movie Classics (AMC), producer of the Mad Men television drama series, is still under the threat of a black out as far as Charlie Ergen’s Dish Network. Dish and AMC Networks have failed to come to an agreement over carriage of AMC’s four channels (AMC, Sundance, IFC and We TV). AMC’s channels are due to go ‘dark’ at the end of this month.
Yesterday (June 4) Dish escalated the problem by moving the 4 channel’s EPG listings down the guide from the 100s to the 9600 ranges. Dish had some 14 million homes potentially viewing the channels, and the lost income could easily amount to $21 million each quarter, say analysts, suggesting that AMC charges around 50c per month per subscribing home.
Dish and AMC’s parent company are fighting a legal action over the former VOOM HD cluster of channels which EchoStar/Dish was carrying. AMC is alleging that Dish broke its contractual obligations when it took down the Voom channels.