Sunbeam Television, which owns WSVN in Miami and WHDH in Boston, reached a new retrans agreement with DirecTV on Thursday.

The deal ends a weeks-long blackout and guarantees that DirecTV subscribers in Boston will be able to watch the Patriots play in the Super Bowl.

“We are pleased that we reached an agreement with DirecTV, and we appreciate our viewers’ patience during this tough negotiation,” WHDH general manager Chris Wayland said in a statement.

WSVN and WHDH, as well as Boston CW-affiliate WLVI, were pulled off the satellite TV service when the previous carriage agreement between the companies expired on January 13th. Read more

Massachusetts Senator John Kerry wrote a strongly worded letter to the presidents of Sunbeam Television and DirecTV this week, urging them to carry the Super Bowl in spite of the current stalemate in their retrans negotiations, which has led to a blackout of Boston NBC-affiliate WHDH.

“To alleviate the anxieties of so many Patriots fans, I strongly urge you both to issue a public statement that your current retransmission consent dispute will not include blacking out the Super Bowl,” Kerry wrote to Edmund Ansin of Sunbeam and Michael D. White of DirecTV.  “I am not taking sides on which of you is correct in your dispute.  But I am siding with the families and small business owners who count on the television programming they pay to receive to be there when they most need it.” Read more

As the New England Patriots prepare for the Super Bowl, DirecTV subscribers in Boston are fretting over a potential blackout of the game.

Sunbeam Television, which owns Boston NBC-affiliate WHDH, is currently locked in a retrans battle with DirecTV and has pulled its stations from the popular satellite service until a new agreement is reached.  Now the stakes have been significantly raised for the negotiations with the Super Bowl less than two weeks away.

The stakes are now so high that Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown sent a letter to both Sunbeam and DirecTV last week, urging them to come to an agreement before the Super Bowl, according to The Boston Globe. Read more

Search engines are the gateway through which most people enter websites, and those looking to find the website of Miami Fox-affiliate WSVN can be forgiven for thinking that the station covers news from the Boston market.

If you type “WSVN” into Google or Bing, the top result will likely be the station’s website. But the listing is accompanied by the following description: “Stay with 7NEWS for the latest breaking news in the Boston area and around the world.”

So why is a Miami station promoting itself as a Boston news source? Read more

Reed Cowan, the anchor of WSVN‘s 5, 6, and 10 p.m. weekend newscasts, has left the Miami Fox-affiliate. According to a source, WSVN’s vice president of news Alice Jacobs announced Cowan’s departure in an email to staff today. A station official confirmed the move to TVSpy this afternoon.

A native of Utah, Cowan joined WSVN in 2007 after working as a reporter and weekend anchor for Salt Lake City’s KSL.  While at KSL, Cowan gained national attention for his reporting on the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart and won an Emmy for his coverage of destructive floods in South Utah.

Jacobs’s staff email did not specify what Cowan’s future plans are, leaving many to speculate about what his next move is. He is believed to be in line for a main anchor gig in a top 20 market.

Cowan is the second high-profile anchor to leave a Sunbeam-owned station this week. As reported earlier, Frances Rivera is leaving Boston’s WHDH for a job in New York.