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Regulatory capture at its finest. I presume you’re aware of retransmission consent, the mechanism that allows local stations (whether network-owned or not) to demand payment for carriage of their signal, that carries 90% or more content that the station does not own, but merely has license to broadcast. This would be fine if most stations weren’t part of large station groups that own dozens of stations. These large station groups demand higher and higher fees from operators (and both sides of every argument are always presented as “[the other side] wants to take your [network] away because they [want too much/won’t pay enough], call them to demand they stop doing that”, when the average person who would see those messages does not have the knowledge to understand how it works, because they quite rightly have more important things to worry about). The networks can be shitty to their non-owned-and operated stations too. The long-term local ABC affiliate got shafted a few years back. They’d been an affiliate since 1969. ABC demanded a substantially larger amount of money to renew the affiliation than they had in the past. The station initially tried to negotiate the amount down, ABC refused to budge. After careful consideration, the station decided to nonetheless agree to ABC’s demands. After all that, ABC still turned around and basically said “nah, forget it” and went with their direct competitor in the market, who already operated the CBS affiliate. ABC and CBS are now subchannels of the same broadcaster, who happens to be owned by one of the larger station groups. The networks do this because it gives the stations more leverage to demand more from operators, and the station groups have more capital than smaller independently-owned stations. The networks also directly benefit, as the stations in the larger, more flagship markets tends to be network owned and operated (O&O). A station group that says “we own X number of stations and unless you pay us more money, we’ll restrict your carriage of all of them” has a lot more pull than a company that owns one station. There is actually a choice, but it’s on the broadcaster’s end. A station can elect to choose “must-carry” status, where the operator transmits the signal with no compensation (which generally only applies to a station’s primary subchannel), or a station can demand payment for retransmission. If cable was invented today, the networks would have it shut down in a hot minute. |