Watch out the NAB is working against us.

[ehren]

I want both my local channels (madison, wi) and Philadelphia. They would get my money for both packages and this whole thing about ads for the local stations is crap. People do not watch commercials. I do not pay attention to local ads anyways. So many people have DVR's so they pass them along anyways. They should be more happy they are getting my $$$$$$.

Even if I am required to have my locals to have access to Philadelphia I am fine with that, why is has to be so god damn difficult!!!!!!!

 

[sam_gordon]

Chill out ehren. As many have pointed out, even if the "evil" NAB was out of the picture, you still have a problem with satellite bandwidth. There's just not enough room to put every channel from every market out to CONUS.

Oh, and for the poster who pointed out you can listen to streaming radio broadcasts... many local TV stations stream their newscasts over the internet. You can watch those there.

There's also the issue of syndicated programs. WXXX (for example) has permission to show Oprah (again, for example) in their market. If WXXX was shown in another market, they might show Oprah at a different time than the local station does. So now Oprah is competing with Oprah.

 

[tempVAdish]

So it's ok for ESPN/CNN/FX/HBO/etc to charge the sat/cable companies to carry their programming, but it's not ok for local broadcasters to do the same?

I apologize for just skimming the thread & possibly missing someone else point this out if they have... ESPN/CNN/FX/HBO, etc, are not broadcast free OTA. They have not been free since the early 80's. If you were to put up a C/Ku dish you would still need either a VCII (if any of them are still analog) or Digicipher or equivalent, to get any of those channels, & guess what, they're gonna charge 'ya for receiving them. So, how can we expect a "free" rebroadcast of them on another system?

Receiving your locals are free if you can get an antenna in a location to receive them. Not everybody lives in an area to get them, so the sat cos & cable are trying to help both the viewers & stations by delivering them by alternate means... to me, this is more of a benifit to the broadcasters than they think. If they're broadening their viewer base for them & installing the infrastructure to get it to the uplink/headends, the locals should be thankful & not greedy!!! I've had no patience with the NAB since the first act to prevent C-Band customers from purchasing networks with their own $$. When the first act was put in place, all networks still had the prime time east, & west, feeds free & in the clear.

Basically the law stated, it's your $$ but we're not going to let you spend it the way you want, so watch the local channel which may replace your prime time shows with a local sports report that you're not interested in. If one person is interested in it, you must be too... and like it! I just don't agree w/ laws like that.

[/rant]

 

[Bobby H]

My own feeling on the original poster's idea is I really don't care about getting local channels from other areas of the country. However, I would like to receive the New York and Los Angeles broadcast network feeds.

Distant network access would be convenient for cases like one of our local TV stations preempting the entire prime time programming lineup in an evening with drawn out cut-ins to cover some thunderstorms in the area. It would be nice to be able to press a button and see the originally scheduled program in HD without the weatherman yammering away over it endlessly. If you're recording a TV show to a DVR, who wants all the weather cut in stuff and weather radar images and text crawls spammed all over it?

Networks are providing streaming versions of their TV shows via the Internet, but the video quality isn't very good. Watching TV shows in a low resolution window loses its novelty pretty fast. With too much of this shifting around it would just be easier to rent the Blu-ray box set of a TV show months later and be able to watch it without interruption, with great video quality and without all the visual spam blocking out parts of the picture.

Like I said, people want local programming as much as the national stuff. They want the 6AM, 6PM, and 11PM newscasts. They want the local yokels giving them info.

Local newspapers and local TV stations do offer news coverage that national outlets are not able to provide. At best national media can make no more than a basic, cursory effort -like maybe covering a murder case if enough people get killed in bloody enough fashion to be news worthy. I'm certainly not going to find any coverage of local city government rulings and whatnot through any national outlet at all and boring sounding news items like that affect my life much more directly than street crime.

With many of the networks now showing their programming on the web, sometime in future the local broadcasters will not be needed except for local news and weather.

The drawback is the cost overhead on a local TV station is too high for a station to merely provide local news, weather and little else. TV stations have to sell enough advertising running throughout the entire day in order to pay the bills. If the station only has significant viewing numbers during its early and late evening newscasts the TV station will go broke.

Look at whats happening to newspapers today. I feel that off air broadcasting will go the same way.

I agree, unfortunately. The funny thing is the general public will cry foul when TV stations in their towns fold, but those same people will largely have only themselves to blame for the loss. I haven't subscribed to my city's local newspaper in years. So I'm certainly not going to have any right complain about it if that paper goes out of business. I'm not doing my part to support it.

I try watching my market's local channels when I can. But I have very little tolerance for "unscripted" TV programs, so-called reality TV shows, etc. I'm not going to carve out the time it takes to watch 5 flavors of CSI either. Marathon weather warning cut-ins do even more to drive me away from watching local channels and seeing local ads that pay for that TV station's operations.

What really stinks is the "blogosphere" will probably have to fill much of the void when hundreds of local TV stations and newspapers finally go out of business.

 

[sam_gordon]

Guys, I don't know what you want me to say. I have as much say in retrans agreements as you do.

I told you the stations are getting less than 25 cents per subscriber. Yet you think the broadcasters are "greedy".

I tried to explain the stations OWN the content they broadcast. YES, they give it away, but not for people to resell. Can you charge people to come to your house and watch a Super Bowl/NCAA/Lost party? Not legally.

As far as weather cutins, I hate them as much as anyone (I also DVR everything). But I'd want that station to cutin if I have a dangerous storm (to say nothing of a tornado) heading toward my home or my kids' school. Even if that storm is 5 counties away, it still affects SOMEONE.

As far as pointing to people who have no chance at receiving the local broadcast OTA, I agree with you. But they are in the MINORITY.

 

[HDRoberts]

Methinks sam_gordan works for a TV station.

 

[Bobby H]

I used to work for a TV station as well. There's no doubt some others participating in this forum have worked at TV stations at some time or another.

It seems fair to me for Dish Network to charge a few bucks per month to provide local channel service. The wired infrastructure going to the uplink facility and the satellite bandwidth both cost significant amounts of money. That $5.99 per month fee is a way of recovering those costs.

It doesn't seem quite as fair for companies who own local TV stations to charge much of anything to satellite companies to retransmit their signals. The TV stations aren't having to help with any of the costs in getting their signals up on the satellites. Availability of those local TV signals on the satellites only helps those local TV stations by improving their pool of potential viewers and possibly increasing advertising revenue.

What is the average cost of adding a local TV station's HD channel to a satellite? I'm wondering if the local channel subscription fees we pay even balance out the cost. Reselling network TV isn't the main motive on why Dish Network and DirecTV carry hundreds of local TV station channels on their satellites. The real issue is just about every local cable company does have the local channels and that is a primary decision maker on whether a potential customer chooses cable or satellite. If anything, the act of providing local TV channels on a satellite could be a "loss leader" item just to keep a possible customer from choosing cable instead.

As far as weather cutins, I hate them as much as anyone (I also DVR everything). But I'd want that station to cutin if I have a dangerous storm (to say nothing of a tornado) heading toward my home or my kids' school. Even if that storm is 5 counties away, it still affects SOMEONE.

I live in the middle of "Tornado Alley" and appreciate weather warnings as much as anyone. But they have to operate their cut ins within reason. And that means get to the point and get back to network programming ASAP.

At least one of our local TV stations treats the mere presence of some bad weather as an opportunity to run telethon-length cut-ins. Even with some garden variety severe thunderstorms the weatherman can choose to be on for four hours straight, completely eliminating some prime time shows. That's overkill and just plain unnecessary. It's especially unnessary when they have ".2" and ".3" DTV multicast channels where a lot of that stuff could be shown anytime. But no! Let's completely preempt network programming.

That same station has a character generator system that badly needs updating. If they have to put up any weather watch text on screen then no one is seeing anything in high definition. It all gets dumped to SD.

The solution this local TV station gives when cut-ins preempt network programming: watch the show on the Internet. The problem with that solution is I'll see none of the local TV commercials there. With enough viewers opting to watch network programming on the Internet that local TV station's viewer ratings will dip and eventually dip badly. And that will give local businesses a solid excuse to spend their ad money elsewhere.

Some local TV stations are just too full of themselves in self-importance when it comes to those cut-ins. They're acting like they're the only source anyone has for that information. Um, there's the Internet. There's other TV stations and the Weather Channel. I happen to own a device anyone living in Tornado Alley should have: a battery powered NOAA Weather Radio. That's a more useful tool than a TV channel's weather cut in because it works without electricity (the power does get knocked out during severe storms which equals no TV) and a NOAA Weather Radio can wake you in the middle of the night when it is most dangerous for something like a tornado to strike. My TV can't do that.

 

[JonUrban]

It would be nice if as a subscriber of satellite or even cable that you could get the area stations from any major market that you chose to pay for. Even if there was a provision that said you could only do this if you also subscribe to your local stations.

I would love to have NY and LA stations so I can catch a show I missed here on the East Coast, esp if I forgot to program the DVR or something like that. Plus, it's nice to have an alternate source for programming at different times.

Even if they did one major area per Time Zone.