Ruling leaves some Dish viewers without networks
When Gardner resident James Bargnesi woke up yesterday, NBC, Fox, and CBS channels from across the country had disappeared from his satellite dish, disrupting his normal routine. At Satellite Video, a satellite television installation company in White River Junction, Vt., calls began to trickle in from customers upset that they had lost the Manchester, N.H., ABC affiliate that provided their local news.
Yesterday, satellite TV provider Dish Network was ordered to shut off so-called "distant network channels" to an estimated 900,000 of its 12.8 million customers, ending a nine-year legal battle with networks over copyright violations.
Distant network channels are stations beyond the ones offered by a local affiliate. A Florida judge found in October that Dish's practice of offering such service where local stations are available violated the Satellite Home Viewer Act and issued an order to stop Dish from offering them to customers, beginning yesterday .
"We're out of the distant network channel business. We can no longer offer distant networks to our customers, period," said Kathie Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for Echostar Communications Corp., which owns and operates the Dish Network .
In most markets, Dish airs local affiliates, so most people will still have access to the networks . But in New England, subscribers in Springfield-Holyoke and in Presque Isle in northern Maine will be left without access to the networks, Gonzalez said.
"I feel that the only people that are really being punished by this injunction against Dish Network are the extreme rural citizens of towns such as mine that can not receive major television networks over-the-air and have no access to cable," Scott McCullough , a Dish subscriber who lives in the Presque Isle service area , wrote in an e-mail.
DirecTV Group, Dish Network's main competitor with 15.5 million customers, has been able to retain its distant channels because it has not been accused of sending the channels to users already served by local affiliates. The company is trying to lure customers who will lose channels with a $150 cash-back offer if they switch services. Gonzalez said that she did not know whether there had been any customer attrition.
The Carmel Group, a media research firm, has estimated that 600,000 of the customers who lost access to the national broadcast networks were legal subscribers -- people who lived in areas where local affiliate channels were unavailable -- and projected a bump in DirecTV subscribers.
But as Dish customers turned on their televisions yesterday, only to find channels missing, some were simply confused.
In Grafton and Sullivan counties of New Hampshire, customers are used to watching a Manchester station for local news, according to Dave Adams of Satellite Video in White River Junction . Now, because of how the service area divided , he said they are only getting Burlington channels.
"People that had New York and Los Angeles [channels] were affected, but it was a very small percentage of our customers," Adams said. "In this area, they want to be able to get their local news."
Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com. 
