ABC no longer available?

I believe Dish is also in a dispute with Nexstar that started much earlier this year.

@m2cosey1 

Yes you have the right to be unhappy. Nobody is disputing that.

Your service agreement dates are different from the dates of the carriage agreement with DirecTV and the channel owner. It is practically impossible for those to be the same. So the agreement between TV provider and channel owner could expire while your agreement hasn't.

It is because of that they have to disclose channels can change at any time. Nobody can guarantee you will always have any specific channel or for the length of your service agreement. Your agreement is to keep DirecTV service for that time because of some promotion you got (discount, equipment, new install, etc.). It will never be a promise of channels guaranteed.

You can certainly try going to Dish, but again it doesn't protect you from this happening all over again. They go through their share of hard negotiations with the channels owners as well. Nexstar is just one owner of many. Tegna, AMC, Disney, Viacom, Mission, are just a few who have caused grief over the years.

I believe Dish Network is also in a dispute with Nexstar.

In addition, Dish hasn't had the regional sports channels for several years now and is unlikely to re-add them.

I did read that dish is also in dispute, but have a temporary agreement to keep it on the air. I really don't care about sports, but ABC is Must. If they don't straighten this out soon, I will not have either. Save some money anyhow. 

It is most likely the same offer they gave DTV to extend the contract to Oct 31 the middle of football season while you don't care about sports Nexstar did this to anger the people that do to leverage DTV to cave into their demands and raise your bill even more.

Maybe submit your complaint to Nexstar. Or just give up on ABC being "a must" since their owner is strategically planning agreement end to upset customers to use them as leverage and watching something else.

Yes, a complaint to nexstar is a good idea, however, since the vast majority of what we watch is on ABC, I do not see the sense in paying for a bunch of channels we don't really care about. I am hoping the antenna works. 

If the antenna does not work, and you absolutely must have Nexstar's ABC, then I would consider lowering to the Family package (if you aren't already on it) as it is the lowest costing package. You have the option of suspending service (up to 6 months within a 12 month period), so putting the service on hold giving time for negotiations to complete is an option. And if Nexstar goes extreme and holds out the length of it, you can still go about canceling if you want.

Not that it matters the contract with Nexstar expired last Sunday at 4:00 pm Pacific time.

Lowering the package is an option to make it easy to get it back, but I am already on a pretty basic plan. Not sure how much lower they go. It may not matter anyhow as we are building a new house and might have Spectrum a available there, it's iffy. 

As for how long ago they stopped having ABC, if the history with fox is an indicator of what is to come, it's is for an indefinite amount of time. 

The packages go Family, Select, Entertainment, Choice, Xtra (or Preferred Xtra), Ultimate, Premier.

So Family is the absolute lowest package. The package cost itself is $29.99. As I recall Select was over $60 now, so Family is less than half that price.

Their is a issue with Direct tv loosing channels every year. This is with one of the local channels. Looks like you will not have it resolved until Oct 2023 which is unacceptable,and to provide a one time credit of 10.00 is a joke. 

@lmullins35 

This issue is hardly unique to DirecTV. Check out the facts here ....

https://youtu.be/rppTzSP5NI4

@lmullins35 

This is not an issue with DirecTV itself. All TV providers go through these carriage negotations. And in recent years, more often local affiliate owners are pulling the feed to raise costs (which in turn raises our bills that much more).

Nexstar may be the biggest offender, but they are not the only one. Mission, Tegna, even Viacom have dones this at one time or another. Naturally their agreements do not happen at the same time so they each pull at different times.

You're right it is a joke. It shouldn't even be offered as per the Terms of Service channels can change at any time. We all pay the same base package cost no matter how many locals we individually have (be it 5, 10, or 20). But once an agreement is reached, we can expect that Nexstar got some increased cost so it would make more sense for those $10 credits to be budgeted into the future expense to Nexstar instead.

@lmullins35 

Who said anything about October? This could be resolved in the next few moments for all anyone knows.

You're paying far, far less than $10/mo for the channels you're missing. In addition, the retentions department can probably offer you more than that.