Pay-TV service outages occur across the country at...

Pay-TV service outages occur across the country at a remarkably higher rate due to bad weather or lousy service, rather than as a result of retransmission consent disputes, TVfreedom.org said. The pay-TV industry’s “claims of innocence” in such disputes “are belied by their desire to push broadcast TV content behind the ‘pay-wall’ on every platform, including the Internet,” a spokesman said in a blog post (http://bit.ly/1j7Ml6h). The industry seeks to control access to all TV content, drive up prices for cable and satellite TV subscribers and “diminish the ability of broadcasters to serve as a viable market force in delivering popular programs to consumers on a variety of competitive digital platforms,” he said. Last year, 19 disputes resulted in disruptions to pay-TV viewers’ access to local broadcast news and programming, he said. The vast majority of those cases “were settled quickly after being blocked by pay-TV systems,” he said.