Nexstar Media CEO Perry Sook said his company is pushing ahead on distribution deals with virtual MVPDs even if the overall revenue impact from those deals has yet to materialize in meaningful ways.
“We are of a mind that we will have agreements with all the networks by year end and all of the participating OTT services by year end, and we’ll see what it ultimately amounts to,” Sook said.
Nexstar did get its first subscriber statement during the third quarter and Sook said the company was “pleased.” “We are now starting to see a modicum of OTT subscribers.”
Nexstar Media is being paid for virtual MVPD involvement on a per-subscriber basis and Sook said that Nexstar is anywhere in between “benign to slightly better off” if the subscribers come in through the OTT door as opposed to the MVPD door.
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Over the summer, Nexstar said it reached an OTT master agreement with ABC that covers services from DirecTV Now, Sony PlayStation Vue, YouTube TV, CenturyLink and ABC’s TV Everywhere. The deal for Nexstar covers 24 of its owned or operated stations and comes as part of a broadcast affiliate agreement extension through 2022.
During the third quarter the company reached agreement with CBS for participating in OTT offerings with the network.
“Nexstar now has reached mutually satisfactory agreements with three of the big four networks for participation in OTT services,” said Sook in a statement.
Looking ahead, Nexstar said a handful of NBC affiliates are the only agreements that expire between now and the end of 2018, we have some NBC at the very end of 2018. Nexstar is the second largest NBC affiliate group.
“We believe we’ll maintain a net retrans margin that is acceptable to us,” Sook said.