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.

Comments

The idea here...

[brooks_talley]

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

Re:I don't get it....

[clark625]

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.