​Dish Network and Sinclair Broadcast Group narrowly missed a massive blackout over the weekend, agreeing on temporary terms before the companies’ retransmission contract was set to expire on Saturday, Aug. 15.

Dish and Sinclair have agreed on a short-term contract extension that will keep local channels on Dish for the time being. The contract was set to expire at midnight on Saturday night, but Dish released a statement at 3:30 a.m., announcing that they had averted any loss of signal with a short-term extension.

On Saturday, Dish filed a complain with the FCC, saying that Sinclair violated good-faith covenants of its retrans consent rules. It later asked the FCC to stop any action on the prior complaint while the two companies continue to negotiate.

“We appreciate that we have mutually created time to try to find the right path to serve consumers,” Warren Schlichting, SVP of programming at Dish, said in the statement. Dish had originally stated that Sinclair refused to negotiate its contract in order to allow retransmission of Sinclair stations, including Fox, ABC and WB affiliates, unless Dish lets Sinclair negotiate for several stations Sinclair doesn’t control.

The current deal keeps 153 local stations available for Dish customers in 79 markets around the country. The two companies are continuing to negotiate on a new long-term agreement.

Dish and Sinclair also had a retrans contract issue in 2012, which was also settled without a blackout.

Read more at Bloomberg Business.

Brief Take: With Dish’s 14 million subscribers and Sinclair’s 153 local outlets around the country, this could have been one of the biggest recent retrans battles that are becoming more and more frequent in the broadcast industry.

[Image courtesy of Dish]

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