Pay-TV Operators Organize To Lobby For Retrans Changes
A group of pay-TV operators, independent programmers and non-profit groups formed the American TV Alliance to lobby Congress and the FCC on changes to retransmission consent rules. The group, which announced itself in ads in Communications Daily and the Washington Post, includes DirecTV, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner Cable and the American Cable Association, programmers Discovery, Outdoor Channel and groups including the New America Foundation and Public Knowledge. It sees potential to change the rules both at the FCC, where a petition from many of those entities is pending, and in Congress where leaders have discussed a rewrite of the Telecom Act, said Mediacom Vice President Tom Larsen. “Either would be a positive result for us,” he said. “I don’t think we're going to isolate ourselves to any single strategy.” Among the group’s main goals is to have carriage of TV stations preserved during disputes with distributors, it said.
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Broadcasters fired back. “The notion that Time Warner [Cable] and its Big Pay TV allies are part of a group designed ’to protect consumers’ is about as credible as BP executives joining Greenpeace,” an NAB spokesman said. Broadcasters also pointed to programming disputes between pay-TV operators and non-broadcast programmers -- including one between Cablevision and AT&T (see separate report in this issue) -- to label the group as hypocrites. “It’s to our benefit to have cable networks, owned by a cable system, in a retransmission fight at the same time,” the spokesman said. “It just points out how ludicrous their argument is."
The alliance said it will focus on the differences between how retransmission-consent disputes and disagreements among pay-TV networks and operators are treated under current rules. “While the broadcasters on the one hand support blackout protections that preserve their advertising revenue during ‘Sweeps,’ they don’t want to afford the viewing public similar protections,” said Andrew Reinsdorf, DirecTV senior vice president. “The viewing public deserves protections against broadcasters who threaten a blackout of marquee programming such as the Super Bowl or the Oscars."
To coordinate their message in Washington, the alliance hired Purple Strategies and Mark Isakowitz of Fierce Isakowitz to handle marketing, public relations and government relations, Larsen said. Beyond a unified message in Washington, the group will also support members in individual disputes with broadcasters, he said.
Comcast, the largest U.S. cable operator, is absent from the alliance, as is the NCTA. The alliance represents pay-TV operators that serve about 70 million TV households, Larsen said. “If you have 65 percent of the TV households in the U.S., I think you've got a pretty powerful coalition.” The group has 31 members.