The company promises to increase the average customer’s monthly bill by about 4.5 percent. This increase in price aims to compensate for the substantially higher fees on DirecTV’s lineup of channels, as it will be paying media companies 8 percent more for the same channels in 2013.

“Almost all programmers who provide channels to the DirecTV platform are increasing their rates at a level we’ve never seen before,” DirecTV said in the message. “On occasion, some negotiations of new and existing channel contracts have become public recently so you can see we are doing all we can to make sure you do not suffer unfair price increases as a result of unreasonable demands in these disputes.”