MVPDs Engineering Blackouts to Get Retrans Revamp, NAB's Smith Says
MVPDs like AT&T are abusing the retransmission consent regime to trick Congress into using a possible Satellite Television Extension and Localism Act reauthorization as a vehicle for rewriting the retrans system in their favor, said NAB President Gordon Smith at a Media Institute lunch Tuesday. STELA "has outrun its usefulness" and should be allowed to sunset, he said.
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Smith spent multiple minutes criticizing AT&T, accusing it and Dish Network of seeming to deliberately withhold broadcast signals to make the retrans system appear broken and get it upended. The two MVPDs are at the center of most retrans blackouts over the past eight years, including seven involving AT&T in the past seven weeks, Smith said. He said AT&T also has "chosen to exploit" STELA's distant signal license rather than offer local broadcast stations, citing New York City local news being shown in southern Kentucky. AT&T referred us to its letter to members of Congress on its retrans dispute with CBS blaming the broadcaster for the dispute (see 1907190056). The American TV Alliance said blackouts and retrans fees are breaking records in 2019 despite declining TV viewership, with 230 blackouts so far this year compared with the previous record of 213 for all of 2017.
NAB "was out of line ... when it accused pay-TV distributors of manufacturing blackouts for political and legislative advocacy reasons," Dish emailed. It said broadcaster blackouts and skyrocketing retransmission consent prices have been an issue for over a decade and are "hardly new to 2019." Dish said broadcasters own the content and are the ones hurting consumers by withholding it when exorbitant pricing demands aren't met. It said there needs to be "meaningful reform to the outdated laws that allow broadcasters to game the system.”
The vast majority of retrans deals happen without any disruption in service, and probably all of them would if MVPDs weren't trying to create problems deliberately so Congress will amend the rules regime in their favor, Smith said. And with broadcast advertising being "cannibalized in the digital age," retrans fees are necessary to keep providing programming such as investigative journalism, he said.
Social media, while democratizing by giving people a broad forum to discuss ideas, is also destabilizing with "the glue of civility" seeming to come apart in civic discourse, Smith said. But local broadcasters "give our communities coherence" and can be the place "where people go to get the facts" as an antidote to rumors reported as news and ad hominem attacks.
The FCC's kidvid order (see 1907100067), while it could have gone further, went "far enough that broadcasters were given some elbow room" without the issue becoming "a political football," Smith said.
Asked about the C band, Smith said NAB's priority is to ensure signals carrying content important to broadcasters don't suffer interference. Asked about NAB's thoughts on rumblings calling for the breakup of tech giants, Smith said concerns about their scope and size was a rare area of agreement for him with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. "These are bigger than nation-states," and there's a public policy question about a tipping point when their privately owned platforms have public implications, he said.