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HDHomeRun Premium TV Networks Dark During Contract Negotiations

HDHomeRun Premium TV Networks Dark During Contract Negotiations

Subscribers to SiliconDust’s HDHomeRun Premium TV streaming service have noticed recently that many of their favorite channels have gone dark—they’re not available. Eight of HDHomeRun’s 45 channels are currently unavailable on HDHomeRun Premium TV: Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, Food Network, Hallmark, HGTV, OWN, TLC, and Travel Channel.

SiliconDust recently posted to its support forum that this is the result of an “upstream contract dispute.” Since SiliconDust resells a third party’s television service, it’s likely that this is entirely out of their control.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that in their support post, SiliconDust indicated that they’ll be crediting Premium TV customers $10/month while the channels are unavailable. If you do the math, that’s more per channel missing than customers are currently paying per channel in the service.

SiliconDust’s CEO declined our request for comment except to say that we should “stay tuned for updates.” Hopefully this is something that we’ll see resolved shortly. Network carriage disputes occur all the time, but it’s usually with traditional linear providers. And it’s usually a game of chicken. Who will give first? We just don’t know. What we do know is that this is out of SiliconDust’s hands. Hopefully the resulting conclusion won’t make SiliconDust’s current rate plan unmaintainable.

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