Dish Slings Accusation at Charter Regarding Over-the-Top Video Unfriendliness

Dish continues to "Sling" accusations at Charter about its online video friendliness, more specifically the lack of it. In a pre-holiday filing at the Federal Communications Commission on the company's proposed merger with Time Warner Cable, the satellite company said that rather than viewing over-the-top video providers (OVDs) as "often a complement" to multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs, or pay-TV) video and unlikely to be "foreclosed," Charter clearly treats Dish's Sling TV OVD services as a competitive threat.

Dish cites Charter's "laser-like focus" on Sling TV and what it claims are Charter's "thinly veiled complaints to programmers about making their programming available to Sling TV" and others. Dish cites highly redacted internal documents it got access to via the FCC's merger review. A spokesperson said the company has filed an unredacted copy with the FCC. "There is no more friendly broadband provider to OVDs including Sling than Charter," the company said. "Charter’s slowest speed is 60 Mbps, we have no data caps, no usage based billing, no contracts and no modem fees.” The FCC has made clear in other deal reviews that access to over-the-top programming is a key competition issue.