Today Spectrum and Fox announced a new long term deal that will keep FOX Television Stations, FOX News Channel, FOX Business Network, FS1, FS2, BTN, and FOX Deportes on Spectrum TV. As part of this deal, Spectrum and FOX have agreed to work together to “mitigate piracy, implementing business rules to address unauthorized access to content.”
Exactly what this means is unknown but this news comes a few months after Disney and Spectrum also agreed to work together to crack down on piracy. From the sounds of it, Spectrum is working on some effort to prevent unauthorized access to content by cracking down on password sharing. Sadly, the announcement of this new partnership did not include any details on how they would work together to stop piracy.
“We are pleased that our renewed agreement provides Charter customers with continued access to our entire suite of networks and expands the ways in which they can access the FOX brands through additional video-on-demand and TV Everywhere platforms. We appreciate Charter’s professional and collaborative approach throughout this process, and we look forward to expanding on our partnership in the days ahead.” Said Michael Biard, President of Operations and Distribution for FOX.
“This agreement allows continued access to all of the FOX programming for our customers and FOX viewers, but it will also amplify our mutual efforts to address piracy and abusive password sharing issues. We appreciate FOX’s desire to further collaborate as the video landscape continues to evolve.” Said Tom Montemagno, Executive Vice President, Programming Acquisition at Charter.
Piracy has become a major issue as millions around the world now use pirate services to access cable programming. This not only hurts Spectrum but also hurts content owners. Just last week we saw Comcast and Viacom join ACE to fight piracy. Now FOX and Spectrum team up to do the same. This will likely be the first step of many to crack down on piracy.
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