Dish and Sling TV removed several Univision channels in the United States

Randy Falco, Univision President

Dish and the OTT Sling removed several Univision Communications channels from their grids since June 30, Latino subscribers of the US pay TV operator do not have access to the Univision channels, UniMás, its affiliated stations, and Galavisión. And its streaming Sling TV service, turned off the Univision, UniMás, Galavisión, Univision Deportes Network (UDN), El Rey Network, TLNovelas and Foro TV channels.

In a statement, Univision said that “Dish rejected a proposal to extend the current contract between the parties to allow negotiations on the renewal to continue without interrupting viewers’ access to content.” Univision spokespersons assure that Dish insists on paying only one fraction of what they pay their peers in English, some of them with far fewer viewers.

Dish says that ‘Univision is demanding that Dish pay almost 75% more than what they now pay for channels whose tuning has decreased approximately 30% in the last five years.’

Alfredo Rodríguez Díaz-Marta, VP of DishLatino and Sling Latino, said: “The price hikes attempted by Univision impact Hispanics despite the fact that there are fewer members of our community watching Univision.” He added: “This is the fourth time that Univision has suspended its signal with a pay TV provider in the last two years.” One of those suspensions was the one that occurred in October 2016, when for a month AT&T took Univision out of its U-Verse service.”