Advanced Television

RRsat sues Fashion TV

March 7, 2014

By Chris Forrester

International broadcaster Fashion TV is being sued in an alleged carriage dispute by RRsat. The news emerged during RRsat’s results conference call on March 5th.

RRsat’s CFO Shmulik Koren told analysts that during Q4 it had booked a potential bad debt of $490,000 “relating to Fashion TV, a now former customer. “Subsequent to the end of the quarter we took down the former customer’s content for non-payment. In February 2014, we filed a $5 million lawsuit in Israel to recoup the debt owed to us. A few positive notes; first we expect to recoup the write-down when the lawsuit is resolved and potentially recoup monies beyond $490,000 write-down.”

CEO Avi Cohen, added: “Fashion has been fairly long term customer for RRSat. I think many, many years long before I came on-board. A good customer, not the largest as a matter of fact it used to be but over the past few years it got behind in terms of its size versus many others as we made progress in our business.” Mr Cohen alleged that Fashion TV had fallen behind with payments.

“We didn’t get paid and we just felt that it’s not right for the company, for shareholders, for our business to continue providing services where we have tremendous amount of costs and we are not getting paid and we basically according to our contract with them as they were in a major contract we took them down and no choice but to try to cover their debt through legal proceeding,” added Cohen.

advanced-television.com was unable to contact Fashion TV executives for a response to the move.

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