I don't think it's at all likely. Broadcasters may be having a rough time these days, but a television broadcast license is still a valuable property.
Furthermore, broadcasters enjoy significant government-mandated advantages over non-broadcast programmers:
- Broadcasters enjoy mandatory carriage on cable/telco/satellite retailers within their local markets. If a broadcast licensee can't negotiate a retransmission consent agreement with a c/t/s retailer, it can fall back on must-carry. If it's in such severe financial stress that can't make it even with must-carry, it would probably just go off the air. But it's highly unlikely that whatever programming it had been carrying would be so valuable that it could charge c/t/s retailers more than it could charge when it had the must-carry fallback option.
We hear a lot about how popular networks like ESPN can demand huge license fees from retailers. But few non-broadcast programmers have that kind of market power. For every ESPN, there's a dozen ESPN wannabes that never make it.
- Network affiliate broadcast stations have exclusive access to network programming within local markets. The entire country is divided into Designated Market Areas (DMA). Within its DMA, every network-affiliate station is the exclusive vendor for the network programming. Cable/telco/satellite retailers are required, by federal law, to obtain network programming from the affiliate within the DMA, and they are prohibited from obtaining the identical programming from any affiliate of the same network in any other DMA.
In any other industry, this arrangement would be a called a monopoly. But in the case of the broadcast industry, it's called "consumer protection."
These same issues were discussed here in June when I started a thread "Cable TV Broadcast Retransmission Consent Feuds 'Ease Up'." See
Follow the link to
and scroll down to my comment "Response to Julius Powell.'
As for internet carriage, I think that's even less likely unless copyright laws are extensively revised. As I've noted here before,
*radio* broadcast stations that stream their own signals have to pay substantially more for internet copyright than they pay for broadcast copyright for the identical programming.And that, of course, assumes that some future internet is capable of vastly faster transmission speeds than the one we've got now.
Neal McLain aka Texas Cable Guy
***** Moderator's Note *****Neal, no offense, but I think you're missing something.
Your argument assumes that local TV station are still needed, and that's not the case. As it stands now, local TV executives are on the same dead-end road as the record executives of yesterday: their influence comes from their position astride a distribution bottleneck which has been greatly diminished and will soon disappear.
Local television transmission is going to go away: the only question is how long it will take. The new Digital TV standard was a gift to the cable/satellite/etc industry: it's not usable for over-the-air transmission, and those like me who used to rely on rabbit ears will have to either put up expensive outdoor antennas or put up the money to rent a pipe from Comcrap et al. Even if (as you said) 30% of consumers still use rabbit ears, that percentage - and the consumers who it measures - will quickly fade to a marginal factor, both because those whose antennas come down in ice storms will be looking to their elected officials for cheaper solutions, and because the current generation of children is so used to having cable TV that they won't accept the limits of over-the-air reception. Either way, the local stations lose: their bottleneck will be ineffective as a source of profit and political influence within my son's lifetime.
We could debate the time line, but I think the endpoint is certain. This is the almost the same thing that happened to radio broadcasting, although in the case of radio it was the distribution channel which caused the change: program delivery via satellites obviated the need for local employees, and most radio programs now come from a "Jock in the box" in Cleveland (or wherever). Although radio still requires local transmitters, the lesson is the same: economies of scale *will* doom local TV stations.
You heard it here first[tm].
Bill Horne Moderator
P.S. This _is_ telecom related: Shannon was right, and Ma Bell's bottleneck is _also_ going to go away. It's just a question of when: just ask yourself what happens when satellite phones cost as much as cell phones.