The American Prospect - Unmasking the Local TV Station Monopolies

Reporter Austin Ahlman explains the battle between station ownership and the few remaining opportunities to reinstate regulatory practices on broadcasting companies by the FCC.

Fresh from its partial spin-off from AT&T, satellite cable provider DirecTV is taking aggressive steps to bring down carriage rates—the retransmission fees they pay to reproduce the content found on local airwaves. A disagreement between DirecTV and media giant Nexstar over carriage for local television stations, one of the few areas where cable has competitive advantages over streaming companies, has snowballed into an antimonopoly trial.

The case tests whether there is any might left to the station ownership caps the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has gradually rendered obsolete. In the process, the dispute has revealed the lengths broadcasting giants are willing to go to to own a market.

Increased broadcast deregulation over the past two decades has created station ownership conglomerates that hold large shares of stations in highly concentrated metro television markets. This de facto ownership is giving station owners the power to demand much higher carriage rates from cable providers than in years past.

With cable television increasingly a wasteland of reruns, local stations have grown in importance, and their controlling owners can command a bigger premium for access. But cord-cutting has led cable companies to retrench, seeking to lower carriage fees just as the station owners want to surge them higher.

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