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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.
Why was the regulation created in the first place? It doesn't make any sense to me.
"a quote" -me
You want real competition? This would let local broadcasts all over the f'cking nation compete with each other. Like the news presented better in New York than in Salt Lake City? Or you've got family in Kentucky and want to know what's going on out there with your high school sports?
The biggest change this could have is with advertising dollars. Local vendors would get national coverage - but if a local show suddenly became popular, it could get national dollars.
I'm not saying things are going to be perfect. Local channels that, well, suck, will find themselves really competing nationwide, and have to either get better, or change their tactics to find their niche.
There will always be local stories that are important - but for those who really want a choice, well, I hope that Echostar wins.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
I'd love for this to happen -- I would finally be able to leave my crappy local cable company and still get network programming.
But let's face it -- I don't think that Echostar really cares that much about the First Amendment in this case. They simply want to be able to get everyone to buy their service, including those people, like myself, who have resisted getting a dish because of the SNAFU with getting network programming.
That said, I hope they win.
D'oh -- the stuff that buys me beer! Ray -- the guy who sells me beer!
I am a Canadian, and I had no idea you guys had weirdo laws like this. Up here it is standard to have multiple timeshifted feeds of all network programming, which is naturally accomplished by picking up a local feed and rebroadcasting it nationwide. It is very convienent to be able to get home an hour late for a show, and still be able to watch the feed from Ontario, or even later, the one from Vancouver (I live out east). I dunno why the companies put up with it for this long!
Today, consumers living outside of New York are permitted to subscribe to their local newspaper as well as the N.Y. Times, Washington Post or other newspapers across the country, yet those same consumers are denied access to New York television news.
Personally, I think it would be good for the country to be able to see what the local news is like in LA, Houston, Chicago, NYC, Seattle, etc.
And it would make it much more difficult for national politicians to get away with lines spun for one market. This would at least allow a shot at something interesting to see on the TV. I am tired of all the same old junk.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The only problem i can see here is the license fees paid by local stations for movies etc. are tied to the number of viewers - so by making the channel available to the whole country could force up these costs.
I hope that the law gets over turned. It was a pretty stupid law in the first place. Granted, with three hundred CBS/ABC/NBS networks at your fingure tips your gonna get pounded with the same programming, but having the news could prove to be very useful.
If your going to go to LA for the weekend and you have access to the Local News on your TV (yes, I realize you can get this all from the internet etc..) then you can quickly get aquianted with what has been going on recently over there, weather, traffic etc....
Also, consider this quote from the article... "Even Congressional members are today prevented by this antiquated law from monitoring TV news coverage from their home states while working in their offices in Washington, D.C". This seems to be unreasonable. These people are supposed to be represnting the people, how can you expect someone to stay in touch if they can't even see the news! ;)
Any the real reason this would be awesome is to avoid that damn local blackout for sporting events ;)
-ryanHate local channels?!? Yeah, I hate some of my local channels too. There are also channels that I like that I cannot get because of the retarted local channel rules.
For instance, until recently, I was able to receive the nationwide PBS feed on my DirecTV satellite system. Unfortunately, DTV recently switched my PBS to the local PBS. Now, instead of getting all the high budget, awesome PBS programming like Nova, Frontline, Secrets of the Dead, Nature, etc. I have to watch all the terrible (not all of it, mind you, but a lot) local, low budget shite. I'm sorry, all you PBS workers, but even in Chicago, a good deal of the locally produced public television is little better than cable access tv.
What I would really like to be able to have is both, and I did for a month...but because of these ridiculous FCC rules, I can no longer have the nationwide PBS feed, and have lost most of the programming I was accustomed to getting in a timely manner.
Hell, I'd pay more for the nationwide PBS than I do for HBO.
is to keep the local stations from going out of business. local stations make their money on advertising for local businesses. if you don't watch your local station, then the local station cannot charge as much for advertising. the station in NY is not selling advertising time that is targeted to billy bob in rural oklahoma, the station in oklahoma city is. if you give viewers a choice, then you dilute the advertising market and stations lose money. thats the arguement of the NAB (national asso. of broadcasters). but I do favor removing the rules, I like to see news from other parts of the country, and its better to timeshift (and would allow greater flexibility in scheduling my tivo). For a message board that is packed with this discussion, visit www.dbsforums.com, where there are geeks such as yourself there who do nothing but debate satellite delivered television. (no, i dont work for them)
From what I know about the way local channels work currently For American Directv systems.
Since pirating the programming on american systems is legal in canada.
Local channels are rumored to be "spot beamed" so that only a specific geographic area can recieve the channel, and then only if it has a valid postal, and city/state code set. For the downstream. People in ontario canada can receive local channels on a properly configured satellite dish for either detroit, or new-york. Though once I got the local channels from pheonix arizona to work for a few minutes.
This is done, by changing some information on the iso standard smartcards with card readers which are becomign very common in canadian households with directv Satellite systems.
I personally think that anyone should be able to watch the local channels of anywhere else, at will. Why don't they want people to view the local news from another city? it doesn't cost them any extra.. the only people who might be hurt that i can think of are the advertisers whose products show up on the local channels.
And thats not such a big deal. Because the intended audience is probably still going to watch the local channels for there area.
Enough already... back to work.
- Better to speak your mind than to remain silent, or someone may speak for you.
For a long time they weren't allowed to broadcast local channels LOCALLY either. Cable providers somehow got this legislation in place as an anti-competitive tactic... it's only recently that we're able to have any sort of local TV over satellite. Which is, of course, a Good Thing(tm).
I'm sure the reason this law is in place is for the same reason the other was; the cable companies are fearful that they will be overtaken by something better. Doubtful however; even if they don't have as many subscribers for television, they will for broadband, at least until satellite becomes reasonable.
I have a friend who lives out in the middle of nowhere; he'd have to pay to have cable line laid for broadband. He was checking satellite BB prices - $100 a month for any decent speed... so there's really no competition there unless it's the only choice.
...to be able to browse local broadcast TV from every market in the country? I could catch up on news of my favorite sports teams: the Redskins... the Spurs... the Cubs (well, ok, there's WGN for that)... the Capitals...
It's fun to compare local newsreaders from different markets, as well as find out what's happening in Cincinatti or Billings. But, then, I'm an information junkie.
Of course, the big losers will be the TV sports packages where you can watch any game going on in the country, because that would now be possible without paying anything extra.
dinner: it's what's for beer
Let's say sattelite systems are allowed to carry whatever local channel feeds they want, wherever they want. Now you can get Des Moines news in New York and vice versa. Isn't that great?
Except that unless you have friends or family in Des Moines, you really don't have much reason to watch it. In fact, even if you are in Des Moines, there's a good chance you'll opt for the higher-quality news from somewhere else. The small, stations will probably lose more local viewers this way than they gain in distant viewers. Soon the national ad dollars will flow even more to the larger stations, and the resources (and quality) of the small ones will deteriorate even more.
This is just for news. How about the impact on local broadcasts of network feeds? No one will have any reason to watch those channels at all, and local ad dollars will dry up. Besides what this does for your local TV station, think about what it does for the mom-and-pop shops. They don't have the money to advertise on a national station -- which is what we'll end up with, one primary carrier of each network in each time zone -- and no one watches the local ones. The only companies with the resources to effectively advertise will be large national chains.
Just another step in the homogenization of America.
Nope, no sig
When the satellite system started becoming popular, the local broadcasters and cable companies lobbied Wasington to protect the licenses that they had paid to broadcast their networks (from THEIR POV, this makes sense. They had paid for the right to a certain spectrum to the government when there was no other competition)
And they made the cable companies offer drop rate local only packages, normally cheaper than $10... (BTW, you can still get this package, if you call and ask they will tell you about their "cheapest package" at $30, but if you push them they will offer the $10 package)
It also seems perfectly reasonable, IF you could get the local affiliate from an Over the Air Antenna or Cable, no harm done right?
WRONG!!!!
What if your cable company sucked and (like many companies at that time) went out every time the wind changed direction? And it didn't matter if you actually HAD cable, what mattered was IF it was provided in your neighborhood you had to get the networks through cable.
And if you could receive the local stations signal was determined by: THE LOCAL STATIONS!!! And they based their determinations on distances from their broadcasting towers WHEN USING A ROOFMOUNTED ANTENNA!!! Didn't matter if you were on the other side of a mountain blocking the signal in West Virginia or not, you were within their broadcast area...
And about the only way around it was to get a letter from the local affiliate saying they exempted you.
As the satellite provider we were bound by the laws and by the whim of the local stations, and man did it suck!
Please don't ask me about conditional sports blackouts:ARGHHH!!!!
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
From my understanding of the situation, this law is due to advertising. My family used to have the broadcast network stations (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX) on their Dish Network system, because they lived outside the range of any of the local affiliates. As long as Dish wasn't taking away viewers from the local affiliates, they could give us those stations. Plus we got West Coast feeds.
Then in 1998 they lost their local channels because Dish changed its policies. They've been planning on giving everybody local stations ever since then, but that is a lot of satellites. This is why they've got their eyes on Hughes (DirecTV). With all those extra satellites and the increased revenue, they can afford to broadcast every local affiliate in the US.
But the DirecTV merger still hasn't gone through yet, and AOL-Time-Warner-Roadrunner-Netscape-HBO-Nullsoft is really bashing satellite as much as possible. So EchoStar is using this as good PR (we're fighting for your rights) and a way to stop Time Warner from using its primary attack (you can't get the major networks with satellite).
So why do I think this won't happen? Because the local affiliates have a monopoly on local viewers. If I want to watch the latest crap-tacular reality series on CBS, I'm going to have to tune in to WRGB-6 because it's my local affiliate. Why do the local affiliates have monopolies on their respective networks? Because of advertising. Local companies can't or won't advertise on national networks, because it's too expensive and pointless in a lot of cases. Why would somebody who doesn't live in Albany, NY go there to buy a mattress?
If you follow that progression, you'll see that if Dish Network offers me crystal-clear CBS out of North Carolina and crystal-clear CBS-West out of Seattle, why would I watch over-the-air fuzzy CBS in Albany? I wouldn't. And the local affiliate would lose a lot of viewers, and they wouldn't be able to charge as much for advertising, and then they wouldn't be able to pay their slightly competent news staff, and the local companies wouldn't be able to annoy us with their commercials featuring their almost-attractive-but-still-too-ugly-for-tv relatives who can't act.
In reality, this wouldn't mean the end of the world. Local businesses would advertise on Clear Channel's local station or the local newspaper. They'd still advertise on local TV because Dish would still charge for their service and not everybody can have/would want a dish. But there would be less viewerson the local stations, and we'd have to watch WXXA (local FOX) suck even more than they already do.
But the threat of the end of local businesses might be enough to stop this from happening. That's why the law was put in place to begin with, and they'll no doubt try to use it as an argument now. I hope Echostar wins this (so I can use my DishPlayer to record the Simpsons) but I'm not holding my breath - especially when you know AOL-Time-Warner-etc. stands to lose a lot of cable subscribers if we can get those channels on satellite.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
The way networks are broadcasted these days are totally obsolete, a holdover from when the only way you could get TV was via a local transmitter, including all the severe limitations that brings.
The vast majority of content on TV is produced and distributed nationally. But because of the reliance on local channels rather than nationwide networks, it gets distributed haphazardly and with gross inefficiency. At the same time there is a need for a modest amount of local and regional content (news, public access, sports), but broadcasting that everywhere makes no sense. And while there may be demand for international content (i.e. Anime), it rarely makes it onto the networks at all (at least not in one piece).
Contrariwise, advertising typically only relevant at a local level. There's no sense in people in Houston TX getting ads for Bentara's in New Haven CT, nor should someone in New Haven be getting advertisments for Sonic, a southern regional chain.
The solution? Restructure the way TV is delivered entirely. Allow the (far more efficient) satellite networks to focus entirely on the globally, nationally, and regionally produced material, giving everyone equal and complete access, while integrating Personal Video Recorders into the equation to deliver an appropriate mix of local, regional, and national advertising. Since commercials are broadcast many times over, you can have a special, satellite-controlled channel broadcasting all commercials for all markets, with the PVR downloading and storing only those targeted specifically to the viewer and locality, and inserting them into the broadcast at the appropriate time. It could also allow time-shifting, although that might better be handled with multiple channels. Let local broadcasters focus on local material and end network affiliation. Or provide them with a way to purchase select (current and classic) content from the national networks in a syndicated fashion. Or just let them die off until only a few local material stations are left, and free up the bandwidth from the airways. Digital cable could do the same thing at the local redistribution station, eliminating the need for the PVR component or local air broadcasting entirely. Restructuring could also allow for new services: user-controlled subtitling and dubbing subchannels for international content and non-english-speaking audiences; individually targeted and dynamic advertising; auto-inserted local news, sports, and weather alerts on any channel; low-demand content broadcast late at night and stored for later; Pay-per-view capabilities for individual shows.
Of course, this would all require substantial re-legislation, with the accompanying political wrangling and lobbying. If nothing else, universal PVRs and thus personal timeshifting would dramatically change the way networks compete directly against each other. But no more missing the Red Sox game just because you live near New York. No more missing Adult Swim because your local cable provider doesn't carry Cartoon Network. No more sitting through commercials intended for another audience, or missing shows because they're on at an inconvinient time or opposite another one.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?