Associations representing ABC, CBS, FBC and NBC have filed reply comments with the Federal Communications Commission arguing that the ongoing shift of major sporting rights from broadcast to streaming service is not in the “public interest” because it is forcing consumers to sign up for expensive streaming services and threatens the economy viability of the local TV stations who use the profits from sports to fund local news.
The filing also laid out a series of policy recommendations that would preserve major sports on broadcast TV. Those include: ending station ownership caps, speeding up the transition to NextGen TV/ATSC 3.0, changing the rules on how retrans fees are negotiated with vMVPDs, and giving local stations more power to preempt network programming so they can air local sports and ensuring that
Changing rules regarding station ownership caps and the ATSC 3.0 transition were also major policy recommendations made by the NAB and other broadcasters.
“[W]hile live sports have never been so critical to local broadcasting, the Public Notice comes at a time when the continued availability of marquee national live professional and collegiate sporting events on local broadcast television faces unprecedented uncertainty,” the associations stressed in their filing. “The Affiliates Associations echo NAB’s observation that Internet streaming of sports content threatens to completely upend the system of local sports distribution that has served America so well. The increasing placement of major sports programming behind paywalls on multiple different streaming platforms, including those owned by the Big 4 Networks themselves, threatens to further fragment audiences while forcing consumers to spend more and more just to watch what used to be and should remain free. Sporting events can’t unify Americans if the cost of watching them turns us into a nation of haves and have-nots. And those sporting…