AT&T Sued Over Refusal to Carry Al Jazeera Cable Network
AT&’s U-verse pay-TV service said Aug. 19 it wouldn’t carry Al Jazeera America because of a contract dispute. U-verse began in 2006 and has 5 million video customers in states such as Texas and California.
AT&T officials’ decision amounts to a “wrongful termination of an affiliation agreement,” Al Jazeera said in the filing, which accompanied a sealed complaint. Details on the case came from a cover sheet that contained a brief description of the network’s claims.
Under the court’s rules, a public version of the complaint must be filed within five days unless a judge grants an extension to the sealing of the case. “As a result of our inability to come to terms on a new agreement and due to certain breaches of the existing agreement we have decided not to carry Current TV on U-verse,” Brad Burns, an AT&T spokesman, said yesterday in an e-mailed statement.
Al Jazeera officials contend the AT&T left them “no choice” other than to file a breach-of-contract suit over the decision to drop the channel, according to an e-mailed statement.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-20/at-t-sued-over-refusal-to-carry-al-jazeera-cable-network.html