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EchoStar Asks Supreme Court to Let Unlock Local Channels
Consul writes "For a long time, satellite television systems were not allowed to broadcast local television signals outside of that local area. But EchoStar is asking the Supreme Court for that to be changed." This particular
issue drives me insane and I hope the courts throw out the lame laws. I don't
care about local programming, they shouldn't force it on me. The same tactics
with Newspapers would be obviously illegal.
The idea here is that local broadcasters are highly regulated by the FCC, and allowing competitors to carry the same network material would alter the balance severely enough that the entire local bandwidth / ownership / affiliation regulations would have to be overhauled.
So, in typical government fashion, they decided that that would be quite a bit of work, and there's always some chance that the clock could roll back fifty years, so better to make something illegal than deal with its repurcussions in a modern, thoughtfull way.
Or, at least, that's the way I see it.
Me, I hate network TV. My first choice for a Supreme Court verdict would be "Not only is it illegal for EchoStar to broadcast this crap, it's illegal for local stations or cable companies, too." Failing that, I'd settle for "The networks own the content, and if they license it to EchoStar, it's between them and their local affiliates who they're screwing."
Cheers
-b
Consider that most local news stations pick up their regional/national/international news from a wire service and feed it to a talking head, so that news is pretty much the same wherever you go.
Now consider that if your local news station can't compete in its market against some station from New York, you aren't going to get local news. A station in Ass End, AK isn't going to be able to compete with a station in NYC, because not much happens in Ass End, the national news is all the same, and the WNYC has tons of money to throw around because of the size of its market... so Ass End's station eventually goes out of business. What then, when Ass End has a mayoral election?
The regulation has to do with advertising. If a small, local company advertises on your local NBC affiliate during the news, that company only has to pay the local affiliate for the airtime. If a big company wants to target an advertisement to a local population, they do the same thing--for about the same price (politics and all that aside).
If everyone can watch, say, the DC NBC news and it seems that many people outside of the DC area actually prefer that station over, say, the Baltimore NBC station, then the problem becomes how much to charge for ad slots. The local companies are paying per TV that is turned on during their commerical (ratings, etc) regardless of location. If half of these TVs aren't even anywhere close to you--like on the other side of the country--then the company is paying too much for little benefit. The DC NBC station then charges huge amounts for the ad slots and then only big corporations can afford the time. This isn't fair for small business.
In a perfect technological world, the solution would be that you could watch any affiliate you like of NBC, CBS, ABC, etc, and since they all have the same national feed you would always get the same national ads. When the remote affiliate inserts their own commercial, though, you would be forced instead to watch a commercial that is inserted at your local level. In other words, I could still watch Enterprise via UPN in Detroit (because ours always sucks) but when the Detroit station cuts to a local commercial, I would instead watch a Columbus commercial. That seems reasonable to me--but technologically its not quite there yet.
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
Guys, do you really think that the Sat. companies are going to broadcast 100s of NBC stations instead of 2 (New York and LA, to get the east coast and west coast network stuff) and provice 198 more pay per view channels?
People don't really care about the local as much as they care about the network programming.
However, there is some good in this country to have local news. Any more eliminatation of local involvement jeopardizes the Republic, that needs a citizenry knowledgable of what is going on at the local level. The separation of powers between the state and federal governments is weakened if you don't get information on local officials without jumping through hoops...
Alex
Charlie is as cheap and greedy as they come. He doesn't want to broadcast every local market feed on CONUS. In fact, he can't. There simply isn't enough satellite bandwidth for that many locals. What he really wants is to offer just a few big markets nationwide. Want your locals from the UP of Michigan? Too bad. You get Detroit.
For the next Charlie Chat, ask him why he doesn't carry west coast feeds of most channels. Answer? "Takes up bandwidth." "Redundant programming." I can see the same argument from him for local networks.
Don't be fooled into thinking you'll get 500 locals to choose from one day.