Media and entertainment company Discovery Communications has been hit with another carriage dispute after Finnish telecommunications company Telia said it will no longer offer its channels to its television customers in the Nordic markets from June 8.
The current carriage agreement, which includes channels such as Eurosport 1 and 2, expires on June 7 and Telia has said it has not been able to reach a new agreement adding it will provide its customers with replacement channels.
“We have done our outmost to solve this but unfortunately, we have not reached an agreement,” Jonas Hasselberg, head of consumer business at Telia in Sweden, said. “Discovery still wants to limit where and in which way our customers watch TV, at an unreasonable price increase, and that is something that we can’t accept. We are sincerely sorry that our customers are caught in the middle.”
Around 700,000 households in Sweden subscribe to Telia’s television packages, in Denmark 30,000 households will be affected and in Finland about 60,000. For Swedish customers, the immediate impact will be the loss of the national football team’s Fifa World Cup qualifier against France on June 9.
Discovery Network Sweden press officer Dan Panas hit back at Telia’s claims over price increases, adding that he was still hopeful that a deal will be struck.
“We can start with Telia’s claim over ‘absurd’ high price,” he said in an internal email reported by Swedish newspaper Expressen. “The truth is that TeliaSonera in negotiations has made it very clear to us that they want to pay less for our content than they paid earlier – despite the fact that today we are investing more in the Swedish productions and sports rights than we ever did in our entire history.”
Panas added: “All we ask of them is a reasonable valuation of the content that we put all our soul, power and enormous resources behind. And that Telia therefore – to a greater extent – contribute to high-quality and attractive production and diversity in the Swedish TV market.”