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The Legal Strategy Behind the Fox-Cablevision Dispute
As mentioned in: The Am Law DailyOctober 18, 2010
The dispute over retransmission fees between Cablevision System Corp. and Fox Television continues, much to the subscribers' disappointment, reports The Am Law Daily. Cablevision has proposed to submit to binding arbitration, an offer Fox rejected. "Arbitration is usually a compromise," says Scott Flick, a Washington, DC-based partner in Pillsbury's Communications practice. "Anytime you have a seller, that party will be less willing to go into arbitration because they set the price and it's the other party that doesn't want to pay. Imagine if you went into a car dealership and you offered to go into arbitration rather than pay the price the dealer was looking for. The only thing that will come out of arbitration is a figure that's less than what they're willing to sell for."
Flick added that "in this particular situation, Fox has very valuable programming that a lot of cable subscribers want."
"For many years, cable had been unwilling to pay a premium for broadcast programming because they had a monopoly until satellite [TV] arrived. Now, the broadcasters want to catch up and make up for lost time," he said.
Flick also said that he sees this matter getting resolved quickly, but cautions that both sides could end up losing out.
