These terms describe essentially the same thing. A renewal is the process that happens when the owner of a cable network or group of cable networks negotiates a new contract with a TV service provider like Suddenlink. Retransmission consent is the legal term for the process that happens when the owner of a TV station or group of TV stations negotiates a new contract with a TV service provider.

It’s our goal to provide you a great programming line up at a reasonable price. When the owners of TV stations and cable networks ask for more money, we negotiate with them in an effort to keep costs as low as possible. By holding firm in our negotiations, we’ve kept your annual price increases, on average, between 3% and 5%, which is well below the level that many channel owners demand during negotiations. Some channel owners are asking for 20%, 30%, 50%, or even higher increases in what they’re paid – and often for the exact same set of channels. Imagine the impact on your household budget, if we accepted these excessive demands for just one channel, let alone all the channels we offer.

Unfortunately, disputes between TV service providers and channel owners are more and more commonplace these days. For instance, both DIRECTV and Dish have lost channels for significant periods of time.

The fact is that channel owners can avoid any interruption to you by keeping their channels on our line up while they negotiate with us. During a dispute, it is the channel owners that pull their signals, not the TV provider.

If you switch to a different TV provider, you unintentionally support the channel owners’ excessive demands. And after you switch, you could find yourself in the same situation with your new TV provider, when its contracts with channel owners expire.

Suddenlink is proud of our track record during negotiations and our goal is to control costs and do our very best not to lose a moment of programming.

In each situation, we’ll communicate viewing alternatives, when and where they’re available.

When disputes happen, we will provide an opportunity for customers to offer feedback to channel owners and to us through the dispute-specific areas of this site.

This is an unfortunate tactic that channel owners use to gain leverage in their negotiations. What’s more, before and after they remove channels, they may ask you to call and/or email your TV service provider in an attempt to put pressure on the provider to cave in to the channel owners’ excessive fee increases.

Suddenlink is on your side from the time negotiations start until the time we reach an agreement, and we promise to keep you updated on our progress.

While we pledge to hold prices as low as possible, annual adjustments are necessary due to the rising cost of TV programming and other factors. In fact, the cost of basic cable networks and broadcast TV stations combined are increasing more than 8.5% year-over-year. Suddenlink absorbs a portion of those increases and passes along a portion to customers. We’re able to absorb some of these cost increases because we stand up to channel owners in our negotiations, resisting their excessive fee demands.

TV service providers like Suddenlink are often required by contract to carry both the most-popular and least-popular cable networks. In turn, if we ask for a price for just the most-popular networks, a common response from channel owners is to raise their price, effectively eliminating this option from consideration.

Here’s a hypothetical scenario to help illustrate the situation: Imagine that, under its current contract, a certain TV channel owner is receiving a total of $4.00 per customer per month for three channels. Only one of those three channels is highly rated. In negotiating a new contract, the channel owner now wants $6.00 per customer per month for the same three channels. When asked what the price would be for just the one highly rated channel, the owner responds that it will be $6.50. In other words, the channel owner demands $6.00 for three channels (a 50% increase over its current fees) or $6.50 for one channel (a 62.5% increase). That leaves the TV provider with little option but to buckle down and seek a lower rate for all three channels, two of which you may never watch.