It Bears Watching

It Bears Watching: Broadcasters want a court to immediately stop the nation’s largest satellite TV company from beaming CBS and Fox programs to its customers.

DirecTV Inc. today plans to directly offer customers nationwide the option of buying a new package of broadcast network stations that includes CBS and Fox affiliates.

By dumping its supplier, PrimeTime 24, and directly offering the network programs itself, DirecTV contends it is not affected by a federal court order that would cut customers off from CBS and Fox signals on Sunday.

But broadcasters disagree, calling DirecTV’s plans “a brazen attempt to ignore” the court order issued last year by federal Judge Lenore Nesbitt in Miami.

Their lawsuit is backed by all four major networks--CBS, Fox, ABC and NBC--and their affiliates. It seeks to make DirecTV comply with Sunday’s cutoff deadline and stop providing CBS and Fox to customers who can get the programming from their local stations, broadcasters’ attorneys said. It also would block DirecTV from providing ABC and NBC programs in the future to customers not legally entitled to get them.

Federal law allows DirecTV and other satellite companies to provide “distant” network signals--which come from other broadcast areas--to customers only if those customers can’t receive their local stations using rooftop antennas. But the satellite and broadcasting industries have long been at odds over how to interpret an arcane legal test for determining when a satellite customer can’t get a local signal.

DirecTV argues it can offer the Fox and CBS affiliates because the federal court order with a Sunday deadline applies only to the company’s former programming supplier, PrimeTime 24.

Even if DirecTV’s plans prevail, several hundred thousand satellite customers nationwide are still supposed to be cut off from Fox and CBS programs on Sunday under the court order obtained by the networks last year.