CBS/Dish Deal: No Skipping Ads With AutoHop

by Wayne Friedman , December 8, 2014

A major component of the CBS/Dish Network carriage agreement struck over the weekend comes with a deal over Dish’s mass commercial-skipping device, AutoHop.

For CBS, the agreement means the ad-skipping functionality of AutoHop will not be available for CBS-owned stations during the C7 window — commercial ratings plus seven days of time-shifted viewing metric.

This is the second major deal Dish has struck in a carriage agreement over AutoHop. Major media companies looked to sue the satellite-delivered pay TV service for copyright infringement and breach of contract in May 2012. AutoHop could skip massive portions of commercial time of prime-time programming on the four major TV networks.

Last year, Disney was the first to strike an agreement with Dish over AutoHop. In that deal, Disney-ABC networks negotiated three days of disabled ad-skipping.

TV networks have been pushing for longer time-shifting deals with TV advertisers. This past upfront, networks like CBS and ABC made deals beyond their customary C3 guarantees — commercial ratings plus three days of time-shifted viewing — to C7 deals.

The main carriage component part of the deal covers not only CBS-owned stations but CBS-owned channels, such as Smithsonian Channel, TVGN, Showtime and CBS Sports Network.

Financial terms of the agreement have not been disclosed. Analysts have pointed out that CBS and other networks have been looking for carriage agreements between $1 and $2 per subscriber.

advertising, broadcast networks, deals, media3.0, ratings, satellite tv, time shifting

4 comments about "CBS/Dish Deal: No Skipping Ads With AutoHop".

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Scott Gilbert from The Radio Mall, December 8, 2014 at 2:13 p.m.
So, no auto skip. That just means that people will do it manually.
Reply

Leonard Zachary from T___n__, December 8, 2014 at 3:40 p.m.

The genie is out of the bottle....folks will still want to skip the ads. Carriage rights and re-transmission fees are relics from a legacy of over the air television which should be retired by eliminating the government mandated laws lobbied by the TV broadcast networks. Free markets are the consumer's best friend.

Darrin Stephens from McMann & Tate, December 9, 2014 at 8:47 a.m.

So if this article is correct, people who live in markets where CBS does not own the local affiliate (roughly two-thirds of the country) will still be able to use Auto-hop.

Douglas Ferguson from College of Charleston, December 9, 2014 at 9:48 a.m.

Using the AutoHop feature as a means to get concessions is akin to racketeering, eh? Thank God for manual hop: On any TiVo, convert your tab button (->) to a 30-second hop by using this six-key sequence [select-play-select-3-0-select]