Sounds like the same old company line BS to me. All that programming gets repeated on the cable networks within a day to a few days anyway and 98% of the sports other than the NFL has been moved to cable networks despite retransmission fees. We will be paying $5 per network before long and commercial time will go up to 25 to 27 mins per hour and the networks will still bitch and moan that they are at a competitive disadvantage.
Most of the sports have moved to cable because the networks cannot afford the rights. ESPN by itself (not including ESPN 2, ESPN U, etc) gets more than $5 per basic cable subscriber, whether the subscriber watches it or not, while the ABC stations get something like $1, which is split 50/50 with the local affiliate. So ESPN has literally 10 times the retrans money to put toward that expensive sports programming. I won't disagree that it's a great argument for a la carte cable, but that's not the current market condition.
And then on top of that, with the proliferation of DVRs (which are a ton more convenient than VCRs ever were), ESPN is more likely to have live viewers who cannot skip commercials versus pre-recorded programming on ABC that can be DVRed for later with ads skipped. So ESPN has the sports rights because it has retrans dollars to use up front, then because it has those rights and ABC doesn't, makes more money on the ads than ABC does. (And yes, I'm aware that ABC and ESPN are commonly owned, but Disney isn't a charity and isn't going to use ESPN dollars to prop up ABC, just as the others won't use NBCSN dollars to prop up NBC or Fox Sports dollars to prop up Fox.)
Trip -
The broadcasters get spectrum from the government - they should be paying the cable companies for carriage, NOT the otherway around.
They need to get with the program or die. They pay for lobbyist and votes with the money they get from cable subscribers -- to protect their monopolies from a free market. IMHO
Bob
First of all, most broadcasters did not get their spectrum free from the government. Stations licensed since the mid 1990s have been auctioned, so if you watch KRBK on your FTA dish, that station won the license in an auction just like a wireless company would have, and yet still has to comply with the same public interest requirements as any other station. Most stations licensed before that have been sold in more recent years, and I would find it to be very unlikely if spectrum value was not included in the sale price of such stations to other owners, at least in the more populated areas. While this still leaves stations like the New York network O&O stations which haven't been sold for their entire lives, it's a distinct minority of stations.
So what's your end game, the broadcasters go off the airwaves, encrypt their FTA feeds, and we lose all of their programming unless we're willing to pay for cable? How does that make your life (or mine) better? Because without the ability to negotiate for retrans fees, I guarantee you that's what would happen. That would be a free market action as well, but is that one we want?
Finally, I will point out that I've come to the conclusion that TV in general will move to the Internet long term anyway, primarily because most people don't actually care about efficiency or even saving money, really. (Or about people in rural areas.) People my age, myself included, are cord-cutting or the new buzz word, cord-nevers, which tends to consist of owning a DVR/antenna along with an Internet connection and a subscription to something like Netflix or Amazon Prime. (I don't have a DVR, I actually watch the ads, since I know they support what I watch.) As the numbers grow, cable numbers will drop. Those companies will eventually exit the business as show producers begin charging either per show or for Internet-based content sources like Netflix which are more a la carte and fees can be divvied up by accurate counts of views. Meanwhile, despite the fact that OTA programming will regain its status due to use of antennas, use of DVRs which skip ads will make those viewers worthless to the networks, who will also wind down their programming and follow suit. I don't doubt there will still be ad-supported content, but it will be on the Internet where you don't need millions of dollars in infrastructure and you can enforce unskippable ads more so than you can over the air (where you can't at all).
- Trip
