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Retransmission Consent squabbles


bhratbrat

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Piping in other stations is a dubious choice and would not hold up. If I owned the out of market station replacing a fellow affiliate, I would immediately order it pulled off. The whole reason the first station got pulled down was because the owners want something from the provider. I'm not going to let them use my station as some negotiation tactic for free, and I'd hope other stations would do the same if the same happened to me. Cable providers do not have some kind of free reign over just running whoever they want on their systems. 

 

Also, if Comcast piped in a O&O to replace an NBC affiliate, I can almost guarantee you that would nearly immediately be brought to the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission as an unfair, monopolistic business practice. 

 

Sorry folks, but this idea is right up there with the fantasy of another mass affiliation swap or ABC buying Scripps. Not. Happening.

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5 hours ago, Weeters said:

Piping in other stations is a dubious choice and would not hold up. If I owned the out of market station replacing a fellow affiliate, I would immediately order it pulled off. The whole reason the first station got pulled down was because the owners want something from the provider. I'm not going to let them use my station as some negotiation tactic for free, and I'd hope other stations would do the same if the same happened to me. Cable providers do not have some kind of free reign over just running whoever they want on their systems. 

 

Also, if Comcast piped in a O&O to replace an NBC affiliate, I can almost guarantee you that would nearly immediately be brought to the attention of the Securities and Exchange Commission as an unfair, monopolistic business practice. 

 

Sorry folks, but this idea is right up there with the fantasy of another mass affiliation swap or ABC buying Scripps. Not. Happening.

If this is the case, Why does DirecTV and Dish have the option to get the NY and LA locals in most satellite plans for an additional fee?  The O&Os need to be responsible for their network to be available in a particular city/town or they should have the power to yank off of that station and move to another. this will be a never ending wheel of complaining from every side if disputes continue to get worse. Sinclair and Nexstar have shown us that it isn't about Local areas anymore, it is about owning the most amount of stations to try to get more money from a dying business. If Sinclair and Nexstar were smart, they would each run their own competing networks to compete with CBS,NBC,ABC, FOX and others. The Same thing happened to UPN in 1998 with Sinclair and the CW in 2006 with Fox and MyNetworkTV was born.

Edited by Kenneth Kissel
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1 hour ago, Kenneth Kissel said:

If this is the case, Why does DirecTV and Dish have the option to get the NY and LA locals in most satellite plans for an additional fee? 

All addressed by the STELA act; local stations have blackout rights to overlay O&O's, no matter what, and you have to go through a process that includes actual U.S. mail in order to convince your local station (even a MyNetworkTV affiliate) to watch an OOM station such as WWOR or WABC, and you have to show literal proof, including pictures, documentation and video to show 'yeah, I can't get this station at all by antenna, I can't get cable which offers it, and I'm out of range of a streamer to get this station'...and maybe they'll approve your request, but that's also a crapshoot.

Edited by mrschimpf
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13 minutes ago, mrschimpf said:

All addressed by the STELA act; local stations have blackout rights to overlay O&O's, no matter what, and you have to go through a process that includes actual U.S. mail in order to convince your local station (even a MyNetworkTV affiliate) to watch an OOM station such as WWOR or WABC, and you have to show literal proof, including pictures, documentation and video to show 'yeah, I can't get this station at all by antenna, I can't get cable, and I'm out of range of a streamer to get this station'). Eventually in 2013, Dish decided to stop offering their superstations to new subscribers.

I'm aware that STELA exists but It needs to be amended so If a dispute happens, the OOM NY or LA station should be allowed to replace a disputed station unless the O&O station is the disputing station in that case it would go to the closest affilated station from said market. For Example, If CBS took WCBS down from DirecTV. WYOU, WRGB, or WFSB should be alternates for the NYC market since they are the next closest affiliates.

Edited by Kenneth Kissel
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It's worth noting that Congress let STELA expire. They didn't care enough to renew it for the people that needed it. There is zero chance they would reimplement it with some provision to let cable/sat providers just pipe in whoever they felt like during a dispute. The station groups, networks, and NAB would absolutely not support that. Period.

 

Syndex already prevents this from happening. The local station retains it's local rights even if it's not on the cable provider.

Quote

During an October 2008 dispute between LIN TV Corporation and Time Warner Cable, CBS programming (most notably NFL games, including those featuring the Buffalo Bills) were blacked out in the Buffalo market as a result of LIN and TWC's inability to come to terms on a new contract. Despite this, WIVB-TV (a CBS affiliate owned at the time by LIN, it is now owned by Nexstar Media Group) was still allowed to enforce syndex and prevent other CBS affiliates or CFTO from being brought into the market. CFTO was allowed to carry games in Niagara County, WSEE-TV (out of Erie, Pennsylvania) in Chautauqua County, WBNG (out of Binghamton) in Steuben County, and WROC-TV (out of Rochester) in Orleans, Genesee and Wyoming counties. Time Warner Cable customers in Erie, Cattaraugus and Allegany counties, whose only CBS affiliate is WIVB, were completely blacked out; in the latter two counties, because of terrestrial reception issues, antennas cannot be used, leaving satellite television (which still carried WIVB) as the only choice.

 

 

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13 minutes ago, Weeters said:

It's worth noting that Congress let STELA expire. They didn't care enough to renew it for the people that needed it. There is zero chance they would reimplement it with some provision to let cable/sat providers just pipe in whoever they felt like during a dispute. The station groups, networks, and NAB would absolutely not support that. Period.

 

Syndex already prevents this from happening. The local station retains it's local rights even if it's not on the cable provider.

 

 

An argument needs to be made that people who use Cable, Satellite, and Streaming need to be allowed to carry local channels with fair deals that need to be set by the FCC/NAB and NOT individual station owners so the rates don't jack up to profit status. If these companies fail to reach a deal, the STELA act gets reinstated and Syndex gets voided for the Cable, Satellite, and Streaming provider and may use an alternate station of the provider and owners choosing. I can see since we now have a Democratic congress, If the idea gets brought up on the floor, gets to vote and let the FCC take over if the amendment passes.

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2 hours ago, Kenneth Kissel said:

An argument needs to be made that people who use Cable, Satellite, and Streaming need to be allowed to carry local channels with fair deals that need to be set by the FCC/NAB and NOT individual station owners so the rates don't jack up to profit status. If these companies fail to reach a deal, the STELA act gets reinstated and Syndex gets voided for the Cable, Satellite, and Streaming provider and may use an alternate station of the provider and owners choosing. I can see since we now have a Democratic congress, If the idea gets brought up on the floor, gets to vote and let the FCC take over if the amendment passes.

The station groups are all for-profit companies. Assuming they're not engaging in monopolistic practices,  there is no reason for the government to step in and create unnecessary rules to lower those profits. It is a free marketplace the broadcasters can charge what the providers will pay for the stations. The providers haven't done enough to keep retransmission fees low. The government shouldn't do it for them. If they try that,  broadcasters would probably sue and would probably have a strong case

 

 

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24 minutes ago, ScottJ said:

The station groups are all for-profit companies. Assuming they're not engaging in monopolistic practices,  there is no reason for the government to step in and create unnecessary rules to lower those profits. It is a free marketplace the broadcasters can charge what the providers will pay for the stations. The providers haven't done enough to keep retransmission fees low. The government shouldn't do it for them. If they try that,  broadcasters would probably sue and would probably have a strong case

 

 

But they are engaging in monopolistic practices. What has Sinclair and Nexstar been doing for the last 10+ years. Sidecar companies just to get around FCC rules. The providers haven't done enough to keep retransmission fees low because the laws favor the Station owners. I say let them sue, it's time to change how we look at local stations and local owners in this country. 

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1 hour ago, Kenneth Kissel said:

But they are engaging in monopolistic practices. What has Sinclair and Nexstar been doing for the last 10+ years. Sidecar companies just to get around FCC rules. The providers haven't done enough to keep retransmission fees low because the laws favor the Station owners. I say let them sue, it's time to change how we look at local stations and local owners in this country. 

That's not monopolistic practices. And since the FCC approves the majority of the sales involving sidecars, they seem to be OK with it. You want the government to make changes to suit what you want to see happen. That's not going to happen. The government doesn't have that power. Face it, the station groups are only going to get bigger and thus have more leverage over the providers. It's reality.

 

And I'm saying that as someone who thinks the UHF discount should be eliminated and companies shouldn't be able to use sharing agreements/sidecars as loopholes to get around ownership limits. But it's reality and we have to deal with it.

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Prime time was when WNDU became Wood TV on Adelphia cable now Comcast from 8PM to 11PM in the 90's but there was no syndex it wasn't blacked out. Had WNDU & WSBT out of South Bend, WSYM Fox47 from Lansing, WWOR in NYC was taken off on New Year's Eve in 1994, WGN everyone in the midwest had WGN Superstation. I was surprised that Adelphia cable didn't have WKBD out of Detroit which was Michigan's superstation in the 80's & 90's Cablevision had it on channel 10 I think in 93 or 94 they may have gotten rid of it.

 

I think I remember Time Warner Cable was in a dispute with Hearst for a couple of weeks in the summer of 2012 and took some out of market TV stations which whoever owned the TV station went to court to try and make TWC not to air the channels the courts never ruled when a deal was reached with TWC & Hearst. TWC took the out of market TV stations off and the owners dropped the lawsuit. I believe that Pay TV should get out of market TV when a dispute happens with the local ABC where I live isn't a problem as there is 2 ABC's so if one goes dark you can watch either WOTV or WZZM, NBC, CBS or Fox should get one from South Bend or Lansing since those are the 2 closes markets for Charter Spectrum & Comcast.  

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Remember the stations Comcast wanted to kick off their system and changed their mind? 

Well, some are still going away after all...

 

On 2/7/2021 at 11:12 PM, Megatron81 said:

Prime time was when WNDU became Wood TV on Adelphia cable now Comcast from 8PM to 11PM in the 90's but there was no syndex it wasn't blacked out. Had WNDU & WSBT out of South Bend, WSYM Fox47 from Lansing, WWOR in NYC was taken off on New Year's Eve in 1994, WGN everyone in the midwest had WGN Superstation. I was surprised that Adelphia cable didn't have WKBD out of Detroit which was Michigan's superstation in the 80's & 90's Cablevision had it on channel 10 I think in 93 or 94 they may have gotten rid of it.

 

I think I remember Time Warner Cable was in a dispute with Hearst for a couple of weeks in the summer of 2012 and took some out of market TV stations which whoever owned the TV station went to court to try and make TWC not to air the channels the courts never ruled when a deal was reached with TWC & Hearst. TWC took the out of market TV stations off and the owners dropped the lawsuit. I believe that Pay TV should get out of market TV when a dispute happens with the local ABC where I live isn't a problem as there is 2 ABC's so if one goes dark you can watch either WOTV or WZZM, NBC, CBS or Fox should get one from South Bend or Lansing since those are the 2 closes markets for Charter Spectrum & Comcast.  

 

Despite all of the options out there, there still seems to be no perfect TV option. 

 

Going way back into the dark ages of cable tv (for me) was the 40-channel Warner cable lineup that split CNBC with WKBN out of Youngstown and C-SPAN 2 with BET.  That soon expanded to 70-ish channels with a new fiber optic platform, and to the temporary disgust of their customers, a cable box REQUIRED for any channel above basic.  They soon relented, and moved the expanded basic back to unscrambled, and kept the higher tiers on the box.  This was a good 15 years before the cable companies decided to "box" everything, and when they could do so, completely scrambled their content by going full-on digital.

 

I've said it a million times.  It is entirely possible to make the system a-la-carte.  But no company wants to because they will lose the goldmine of fees they "must" charge the consumer for the privilege of being their only choice.

 

Edited by tyrannical bastard
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2 hours ago, tyrannical bastard said:

Despite all of the options out there, there still seems to be no perfect TV option. 

 

Going way back into the dark ages of cable tv (for me) was the 40-channel Warner cable lineup that split CNBC with WKBN out of Youngstown and C-SPAN 2 with BET.  That soon expanded to 70-ish channels with a new fiber optic platform, and to the temporary disgust of their customers, a cable box REQUIRED for any channel above basic.  They soon relented, and moved the expanded basic back to unscrambled, and kept the higher tiers on the box. 

I still remember the days where we had to have a box because our city's build out had "A" and "B" lines which required an A/B switch and made recording from a VCR a guessing game (I went on a vacation hoping I recorded the ALF finale movie on ABC on the A side...only to come home to two hours of Saturday night CNBC on the B side). Despite that, we still had some split channels into the 90s until Charter bought our provider and implemented one-line service, then digital cable. And we didn't even get BET until 2012 locally.

 

And in that time, we've lost channels because our city was classified as a Milwaukee market city, but Green Bay channels are also in our market, so as networks who don't care about decades-long relationships between viewer and stations, we lost the UPN/MyNet, CBS and Fox stations from Green Bay because of network greed. Thankfully streaming for most of them makes catching their news easy (except for Nexstar stations), but it's aggravating to pay so much a month for all this service and your provider doesn't want to deal with blackout hassles just to keep offering a Fox station from out-of-market, lest they lose Fox News next time because of bitterness on Rupert's end.

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I recall a side-effect of the implementation of retransmission consent.  The stations began running joint ads telling consumers to urge their cable companies to keep their channels on cable.  This was at least a decade before Perry Sook starting directly shaking down cable companies for money.  For whatever reason, WEWS which was on channel 9, got moved to 11, and WJW moved from 11 to 9.  WOIO and WUAB traded spots as well on 6 and 13.  Poor shielding was why 3, 5 and 8 were on 2, 11 and 9.  3 was WDLI, 5 was WVIZ, and 8 was WBNX.

 

On the flip side, WOAC was added on channel 12 and several years later, WQHS was added to channel 7 (replacing QVC) and WAOH got a full time slot on channel 15 (after part time carriage on the access channel). These latter moves were part of must-carry, except for WAOH, which was low power.

 

Years later, these were all changed after Time Warner took over the Adelphia systems in Cleveland, and the lineups were more standardized.  Spectrum has really made things worse with their packages and poorer service than Time Warner had.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Hate to bump up a thread that hasn't been posted in nearly a month but..

 

The remaining NBC RSNs are being dropped by Sling starting April 1st https://thestreamable.com/news/sling-tv-to-drop-remaining-nbc-sports-rsns-ahead-of-mlb-season

 

We can sit there and say "Charlie is being cheap" all we want but unfortunately, like the Sinclair RSNs, him and his team are absolutely correct about the RSNs 

 

This was from a recent interview when asked about bringing the RSNs back to Sling

Quote

“I think it’s difficult,” said Schwimmer. “The thing for most customers to realize is, Regional Sports Networks are a terrible deal for customers.”

He continued, “Because there’s very limited viewership. And yet everybody has to pay for them…it really inflates the bill. We’d rather give the vast majority of our customers a good deal.”

In order to keep Sling’s prices low, regional sports, like locals – has been one of the areas that they’ve dropped from the service.

“We have to make choices, and our choice (with) regional sports…is keeping everybody’s bill low, as opposed to carrying something that in the end gets very limited viewership. There are some passionate fans, and we wish we could serve them by offering this content on à la carte basis.”

In fact, Schwimmer said that if RSNs could be offered on an à la carte basis, Sling “would offer every regional sports channel in America in a heartbeat.” But, that’s not an option right now because “what the regional sports providers want is, is for us to to make them available to everybody, even the people that don’t want them. And that’s where it breaks down.”

That right there is the reason why we may never see the RSNs return to the streamers or even on cable, they need to come up with either a DTC plan or offering it to customers on an a la carte basis, so far the networks don't want to do either one and we will have to wait until '22 before Sinclair comes out with it's own DTC service.

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  • 1 month later...

Well, the whole "retransmission consent" wars could be taken up a notch.  Roku vs. Google.

 

Roku warns that YouTube TV could be dropped from the platform

https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/roku-warns-that-youtube-tv-could-be-removed-from-platform/

 

...and Google's reponse

https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/google-responds-to-rokus-warning-about-dropping-youtube-tv/

 

 

Time to dust off my chromecasts and Fire sticks.   I'm preferential to the Roku platform, but given the lag in securing some of the newer services (HBOMax, Peacock), their behavior is getting a little concerning.  They've already taken down Spectrum's app, but existing users can keep using it if they still have it.

 

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Roku has now pulled YouTube TV from its channel store.  Existing users still have access to the channel....for now.

 

https://deadline.com/2021/04/roku-removes-youtube-tv-from-platform-anticompetitive-1234747416/

 

I'm not going to be happy if this channel goes away because I use Roku for YouTube TV on almost every TV I have.   I have a few fire sticks, but I prefer Roku since it's less cluttered and not overrun with Amazon content.

Edited by tyrannical bastard
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8 hours ago, tyrannical bastard said:

Roku has now pulled YouTube TV from its channel store.  Existing users still have access to the channel....for now.

I'm still waiting for Roku to settle their tantrum with Spectrum that resulted in their app being removed (though it has stayed on for subscribers who haven't hit 'delete' yet, so I have to be very careful when I need to organize my Roku screen). More and more, I'm glad I decided to go with Apple TV and Chromecast as my main stream boxes.

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Roku devices are very appealing to consumers, but users don't see what goes on behind the scenes. As the 800 pound gorilla in the streaming space, Roku can leverage their market share to extract usurious terms from content providers. It's no coincidence that it's the biggest players that are fighting back. Hopefully in time consumers will get wise to this, but they have a lot to learn.

Edited by newsbot
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  • 2 months later...
On 9/16/2020 at 11:39 AM, tyrannical bastard said:

Remember the seemingly never ending fight between AT&T and the Sinclair sidecars last year?

 

Well, the FCC has upheld that the parties failed to negotiate in good faith, and each station could be on the hook for an almost $500k fine. 

https://www.nexttv.com/news/fcc-proposes-dollar10m-in-first-ever-retrans-negotiation-fines

 

 

Bump time.  The  fines have been upheld by the FCC, with one exception.  Mercury Broadcasting's fine was dropped to $30,000 due to their "inability to pay".

https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-fines-18-tv-stations-refusing-negotiate-good-faith

Edited by tyrannical bastard
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