The new owner of Boston’s Fox affiliate is in a heated showdown with Verizon over a proposed rate increase to carry Fox programming. If a deal cannot be reached by early Thursday morning, WFXT-TV (Fox 25) will go dark on Thanksgiving for roughly 400,000 Bay State residents who subscribe to Verizon’s FiOS TV service.

But that Eagles-Cowboys game could be off the menu for hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts consumers.

Should WFXT-TV go off the air, the ripple effects will certainly be felt in Meredith Gallant’s home. The Leominster resident and her husband, Thomas, started calling Verizon’s customer service in the past few days after learning of the dispute. They complained about not being told and made the case that they should not be charged a $200 cancellation fee if they drop Verizon as a result.

Gallant says she likes to watch the local Fox news broadcasts, particularly in the morning, and the lineup of animated shows on Sunday nights, anchored by “The Simpsons.” Her husband, a huge football fan, relies on Fox to watch NFC games. (Gallant says she just watches Patriots games, which usually air on CBS.) After previously experiencing service problems with Verizon, Gallant says the loss of Fox will probably prompt her to switch to Comcast.


“This is just the final straw,” Gallant says. “They’ve got more money than they know what to do with. To not come to an agreement and just solve the problem so nobody has to suffer, it’s silly.”

The showdown is the latest example of how high-stakes disputes between the companies that provide television programs and the ones who transmit them to consumers are spilling into the public eye.

Some battles — such as this one between Verizon and Cox Media Group, the company that acquired the local Fox affiliate last month — involve cable companies and over-the-air broadcasters. Last year, for example, 3.5 million Time Warner Cable customers temporarily lost CBS programs in New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas markets after CBS demanded a fee increase. Other examples include satellite television providers and cable networks: Dish customers have been without Comcast SportsNet New England since August, and DirecTV customers nationwide lost The Weather Channel for three months earlier this year before both sides reached a truce.


Now it is Verizon’s turn in the spotlight. Verizon spokesman Phil Santoro says the problem can be traced to Cox’s acquisition of Fox 25 in a station swap last month with Rupert Murdoch’s Twenty-First Century Fox, the massive broadcasting conglomerate. In that deal, Cox picked up WFXT-TV, based in Dedham, and WHBQ-TV in Memphis. Fox, meanwhile picked up two stations in the San Francisco-Oakland market, largely because it gave the company access to a market with an NFC team, the San Francisco 49ers.

Santoro says that when Cox took over the station, the Atlanta company immediately asked Verizon to pay a rate that would be more than double what Verizon had been paying to Cox for stations in other markets, such as Pittsburgh, Santoro says. Verizon, he says, will not give in to Cox’s demands for rates that could contribute to a hike in subscription rates for customers down the line.

Tom Raponi, vice president and general manager at Fox 25 in Dedham, says the rate increase that Cox is seeking would still be less than what Verizon pays for some national cable networks such as ESPN. He says the long-term agreement with Verizon expires at 3 a.m. on Thanksgiving, but other television services offered by Comcast and the two big satellite companies are not affected. “We’re simply seeking a fair deal which adequately values our news, sports and entertainment, weather and traffic programming,” Raponi says.


He says the dispute is unrelated to changes that he’s overseeing at the station’s news department since arriving last month from California, with a goal of cutting back on commentary and focusing more on what he calls “straightforward newscasts.” Popular morning commentator Doug “VB” Goudie recently exited as a result of the shift. But Raponi says the station is looking to fill about 25 news jobs.

T. Barton Carter, professor of communication and law at Boston University, says these high-profile fights are becoming more frequent as broadcasters get aggressive in negotiations to make up for their declining viewership amid a splintering of the mass television audience. As a result, Carter says, broadcast companies are gradually becoming less reliant on advertising revenue and more reliant on these retransmission fees.

“Broadcasters started demanding more and cable companies have sometimes given in,’’ Carter says. “Sometimes it’s gone to a long-haul fight.”

Jon Chesto can be reached at jon.chesto@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jonchesto.