3 edits | No sympathy for cablecos. They brought this on themselves. Don't you just love how the cable companies are pointing the fingers at broadcasters and saying that the rules are unfair to them?
But if you put the whole thing in historical perspective, you will see that the cable industry are themselves responsible for the current must carry rules.
Must carry has existed since 1972. Under the old rule, every station within X mile radius (60 miles, later 50 miles) had to be carried by the cable operator. No fees were charged by the broadcasters at all. The cable operators however found that some signals were being duplicated by "superstations" they carried that were delivered by satellite.
The cable companies didn't like that so they got together with Ted Turner and filed suit against the FCC. The courts found that the must carry rule violated the first amendment.
So the must carry rule was struck down and the FCC relaxed the rule and applied it only to public stations (PBS pretty much) and every cable operator had to give the customer an A/B switch to pick up stations from an antenna that weren't carried on cable.
But that didn't work. Smaller independent stations found that they were frequently not carried by cable operators who carried satellite delivered "superstations" as well.
In between that there were a few incarnations of the rule where the cable operators were allowed to drop redundant local stations within the 50 mile radius.
In 1992 the must carry rule was then made optional and stations were allowed the choice of must carry or retransmission consent.
So 20 years after must carry first came to be, the net result of this is that the cable companies didn't like the old rule where they were getting programming for free but had to carry all stations, so they sued to have it struck down. They succeeded in having the rules changed, but when it's time to live up to their side of the bargain, now they are bellyaching that the rules that THEY were directly responsible for are not working in their favor!
So, Ladies and Gentlemen, that is why we are where we are today. And that is why cable operators need to negotiate on their own without the Government giving them any more concessions. After all, the old rules worked very well in their favor, yet they simply weren't satisfied at all, so they sued to have it struck down. I think some of them won't be happy until they can only carry the big four and not pay anything for it. Does that seem fair to you? |
 56403739Less than 5 months leftPremium
join:2006-03-08
Naples, FL
kudos:2 | Its going to get interesting once Comcast sees how much they can wring out of their competition for the NBCU programming. Notice how absent they are from this complaint. With the world's biggest MVPD on the other side of the fence it's going to be really difficult for the others to argue that retrans is unfair. |
