I more convinced than ever, let the locals drop if they want to. It will only hasten to get the law changed. Right now it's all up to the networks, they can demand to be carried for no money, or demand money to be carried and threaten to refuse to be carried. BS.
That's not to say Dish doesn't need the networks (locals), they do. No one knows that better than Charlie, he was a pioneer in getting locals into locals for satellite. But the double dipping by the networks has to stop.
You have a misunderstanding about the law. Dish must attempt to carry all full power stations in a DMA. If the station elects Must Carry then it is the responsibility of the station to provide an acceptable signal to the POP. If a station elects re-transmission consent then Dish must act in good faith in negotiating a re-transmission agreement. There is not a penalty for Dish not reaching a re-transmission consent agreement.
Years ago, local stations chose the "must carry" option and generated all of their revenue from advertising. Today, corporate greed has taken over: They want to be paid by the carriers, i.e. cablecos and satellite, AND earn revenue from advertising. Today, being carried by cablecos or satellite is far, far more important to them given the low percentage of viewers who use OTA. They would never survive on advertising revenue based on OTA viewer numbers alone.
With regards to the "must carry", I think some people are confusing 2 different things (or maybe I am)?
There is the Must Carry vs Re-Trans in each market to determine if the channel is carried at all.
Then a separate issue is what is carried in HD, where if DISH is carrying NBC in HD, they must carry all the Networks in HD. This isn't true in every market, as Scott mentioned above, they were given target dates on when they had to have a certain % of markets covered. I think those are the dates and rollout that people are remembering, unless I'm just confusing myself.
no deal yet....just a temporary extension...dated 6/29
Media General, Inc. (NYSE: MEG), a local broadcast television and digital media company, announced today that it has provided DISH with a 90-day extension for its current retransmission agreement that was set to expire June 30.
Regardless, an extension is not granted unless the side giving the extension thinks the side getting the extension is negotiating in good faith. That belies their public notices to their customers that Dish is not playing fair. They need to revise that.
But, an extension is still pretty good change for Dish. One of the complaints we users often had was that DirecTV and Cablecos were often able to arrange these extensions during negotiations, while Dish just removed the channels. It seems that Dish might now be thinking of its subs, and not just maintaining the hard-line negotiating style that perhaps is a reason Charlie appears to be so disliked among the business community.
So, kudos to Dish for taking a major step for your customers. Better late than never!
That was because there is a clause in the new SHEVRA law or whatever its called that if Dish could carry all the DMA's they would be out from under the penalties imposed when they got caught providing distant locals to those of us who were not legally entitled to them. Because of those penalties dish could not even provide service outside a DMA to an unserved segment, i.e. if a DMA did not have a FOX station they could not import the neighboring DMAs FOX station. I believe it also freed up their ability to carry significantly viewed stations from neighboring DMAS. It gave DirecTV a competitive edge in locals.
To answer the question why do Satellite companies want to carry locals - because locals are the most heavily watched channels, believe it or not, if Dish or DirecTV dropped locals, they would lose a lot of subs.
Another part of the law requires that if a carrier carries one local station in a DMA in HD, then they must carry all the full power locals that are broadcast in HD in HD also. However if a low power station or a subchannel is in HD the carriage is not required, but the station that owns it may negotiate that in their retrains agreement.
So if your ABC or FOX is on a sub channel of a full power station, the carriage of it in HD is not mandatory, but negotiable with the station.