For 14 million Dish Network subscribers yesterday, “The Walking Dead” came back to life.
After marathon talks over four nights — including a final session that stretched to 3 a.m. yesterday — Dish and Cablevision settled their legal dispute over the scuttled Voom HD service.
Lawyers for the two media giants will appear in Manhattan state court this morning to formally present the deal to the court.
Under the accord, Dish will pay Cablevision and its former subsidiary, AMC Networks, $700 million in cash and agrees to put the channels back into its lineup. The value of the seven-year carriage agreement is put at hundreds of millions of dollars.
While the settlement is good news for “Walking Dead” fans, it must also be a relief for Dish boss Charlie Ergen, who was scheduled to testify this week in the bitter Cablevision-Dish trial and could have been subject to a tough cross-examination.
To be sure, the deal is a huge relief for AMC boss Josh Sappan — although Ergen doesn’t come away empty-handed. In fact, given that most of the negotiating leverage was on the Cablevision-AMC side, it looks like Dish came away with a sweet deal.
The two were at odds over the move by EchoStar — Dish’s parent until it was spun off in 2008 — to back out of a 15-year deal set in 2007 to carry Voom HD programming.
Cablevision is, in fact, helping Ergen with his spectrum ambitions selling 500 MHz multichannel video and data distribution spectrum to bandwidth-hungry Ergen.
That spectrum sale represents $80 million of the $700 million settlement. AMC is also receiving increased carriage fees over the seven-year deal it signed with Dish and better positioning on the dial in some markets, while MSG gets carriage on Dish for music network Fuse. MSG was spun off from Cablevision in 2010.
Cablevision and AMC Networks, now a separate company whose assets include IFC, Sundance and WeTV, will split the settlement cash equally.
“Dish dodged a major bullet by avoiding the embarrassment of having Charlie Ergen take the stand in the midst of numerous allegations of continued corporate misconduct,” said litigation expert Thomas Claps of Susquehanna Financial.
“Dish’s payment of $700 million can be viewed as a bargain, given that they were facing much steeper damages at trial,” he said.
Lawyers for EchoStar began negotiating last Wednesday after Judge Richard Lowe dismissed the legal teams in the wake of a day of courtroom chaos.
During that wacky Wednesday, a Dish programming executive lambasted Cablevision’s lawyer, Orin Snyder, after coming under pressure during the two-week trial, and later lashed out verbally at Snyder’s father, who was in the courtroom.
Judge Lowe is said to have blessed the deal yesterday after he was presented its terms, hammered out while lawyers and executives chewed on cold pizza and the facts of the dispute.
AMC Networks will suffer $20 million in lost Dish affiliate fees, $10 million in legal fees but an 8 percent growth in ad revenue, according to predictions for the third quarter by Bank of America.
Overall revenue in the period is expected to rise 4 percent over the previous year to $294 million.