NBC Montana Signs New Agreement With Dish Network

After nearly five weeks, the company that owns NBC Montana and KECI-TV in Missoula has signed a new contract to provide programming to Dish Network.

KECI-TV General Manager Dick Reingold said on Monday,January 13, that the new agreement was signed late Sunday night, January 12.

"We signed a new agreement late last night, and now we're back on Dish," Reingold said. "It was all about money, about compensation. The TV business has really changed over the years. In the past, networks such as ours, NBC, paid us a lot of money to carry their programming, but the model has flipped in the last few years. Today, we, and the other local stations, pay the networks a lot of money to carry their programming. Part of the way this works is that we license our programming to networks like Dish, Direct TV and Charter. They pay us for the rights, and then we sell our programming to their customers."

Reingold said he regretted the inconvenience, but the company believed it was important to stand their ground.

"We hated that our customers were caught in the middle of this thing," Reingold said. "We really thought it was important for the future of local TV. In fact, I received a call from the general manager of another TV station thanking us for making this stand, so I think it's a good thing for local TV because this is what pays our bills."

Viewers who subscribe to Dish Network can now find KECI-TV's programming back on channel 13.