Comcast has secured the rights to offer some channels over-the-top on a national basis but would have to renegotiate deals to do the same for others, Bloomberg reported.
Bloomberg said those rights, in many cases, come way of “most favored nation” clauses in carriage deals that would provide the same rights granted to other distributors, including a new class of virtual MVPDs. The report added that Comcast has also asked for those rights in some of its carriage negotiations, though it would still have to rework its deals with programmers such as CBS and ESPN, which is part of Disney.
“We just fundamentally believe, for now, that our in-market footprint strategy is where we add the most value to consumers,” Brian Roberts, Comcast’s chairman and CEO, said last summer on the company’s Q2 call, echoing what he said last May at the INTX show in Boston. “OTT economics are unproven to us. It’s not clear that that’s the right strategy for us.”
Go to Multichannel.com for the full story.
