-
Get involved.
We want your input!
Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.
After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.
After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/
Thanks in advance and have fun!
RadioDiscussions Administrators
Kimmel Ratings
- Thread starter michael hagerty
- Start date
Unless you use an antenna
Those signals are not as strong as they were 30 years ago.
But they're still free. If you want free, you find a way to get it. If it's too much work, you pay someone.
I’d like to see the percentage of how many people get their locals from antenna vs paid service.
People are lazy
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
Scott, thanks for the clarification. Coming from Univision, we used the "Must Carry" term to cover the whole scenario, and I see that it is, in reality, less simple.
We looked at it as "they gotta carry us" so the choice was to bargain or just require "free" carriage.
The difference is in the purely legal terms and they way people in the broadcast industry look at cable; the industry perspective is less precise and more practical.
In those markets with significant Hispanic population where Univision had O&Os, they chose to negotiate with cable companies to extract fees. They knew that there were enough people who wanted Spanish language TV via cable to allow them to take a position of negotiation.
Some of the affiliate owners in smaller markets where the Hispanic population was a very high percentage (McAllen-Brownsville is a good example as is El Paso) also tried to get fees. In the border markets, some cable companies negotiated based on "our subscribers can get all the Spanish content they want from the Mexican stations we carry".
In smaller Hispanic markets where cable companies saw little value in paying for Univision, affiliates deferred to "must carry" so that they would be on the system.
In both cases, OTA households among Hispanics is much higher than in the non-ethnic population. Higher, last I was party to the data, than Black homes. So the cable companies "know" that they lose little by negotiating fees... and they have a mistaken impression that higher income Hispanics don't watch Spanish language TV.
We looked at it as "they gotta carry us" so the choice was to bargain or just require "free" carriage.
The difference is in the purely legal terms and they way people in the broadcast industry look at cable; the industry perspective is less precise and more practical.
In those markets with significant Hispanic population where Univision had O&Os, they chose to negotiate with cable companies to extract fees. They knew that there were enough people who wanted Spanish language TV via cable to allow them to take a position of negotiation.
Some of the affiliate owners in smaller markets where the Hispanic population was a very high percentage (McAllen-Brownsville is a good example as is El Paso) also tried to get fees. In the border markets, some cable companies negotiated based on "our subscribers can get all the Spanish content they want from the Mexican stations we carry".
In smaller Hispanic markets where cable companies saw little value in paying for Univision, affiliates deferred to "must carry" so that they would be on the system.
In both cases, OTA households among Hispanics is much higher than in the non-ethnic population. Higher, last I was party to the data, than Black homes. So the cable companies "know" that they lose little by negotiating fees... and they have a mistaken impression that higher income Hispanics don't watch Spanish language TV.
From Google AI:
Around 14-20% of U.S. households use Over-the-Air (OTA) antennas for TV, with recent Nielsen data showing 13.3% (16.7M homes) in mid-2024, while other sources like Parks Associates and Horowitz suggest figures closer to 20% or even slightly higher, reflecting a stable or growing audience, especially with cord-cutting and sports driving interest, though numbers vary by region and source definition.
The big difference is that lower income homes have higher percentages of OTA TV usage.
From TVTech: In terms of homes with TV antennas, the Horowitz study found that they skewed towards lower income homes and older households. Antenna were used in 26% of homes headed by someone 50 or older compared to 19% for the overall population in 2025. Only 9% of homes with incomes of greater than $100,000 a year had antenna while 26% of those with incomes below $50,000 had antenna.
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I wonder, have any studies (or surveys) been done to determine how many households that could subscribe to cable/satellite/streaming -- or who may have in the past but cancelled in favor of OTA -- are only using terrestial reception based on lesser needs, on the premise that all of the extra channels are not worth the money to them?
(Yeah, I know ... run-on sentence as a question.)
To add to that question, how many are streaming their local networks for free.
BOB BARKER: "Higher."
Why aren't the cable companies packaging all their consent locals into a tier subscribers can opt out of so as to avoid the associated retransmission fee completely? Opt out and you only receive the must-carry locals, and that horse-choking $50/month line item disappears from your invoice.
Subscribers in areas like mine where a roof antenna gets you every channel at 98% signal strength would rejoice. And it would almost definitely slow the rate of cord cutting.
They can’t because the carriage agreements won’t allow it.
How? It sounds like you're saying a station can designate itself as retransmission consent under FCC regulations, then grant itself must carry status anyway through private contracts.
Stations can permit where they are carried on a lineup. ESPN refuses to be on a higher more expensive tier. When agreements are signed they forbid alacarte as they want the most money possible.
I see where the misunderstanding happened. I didn't mean that the retrans consent locals should be moved into an expanded basic tier of some kind (the kind that costs extra and usually exists on higher channels). I was asking whether the cable companies could simply designate the retrans consent locals as a separate basic tier, one that costed no extra money and that would be opt-out (i.e. everyone receives it by subscribing to "basic" unless they ask not to receive it while still subscribing to basic).
The point being, if it was made possible for subscribers to choose not to receive any retrans consent locals just by opting out of the separate but equal basic tier they were compartmentalized into, those subscribers could avoid having any retrans fees appear on their bills. There would be no a la carte involved, as you aren't picking which specific stations you wanted or not; you would be turning on or off a whole category of stations. Being able to tell the cable company "I want all retrans consent stations blocked" would be similar to how the phone companies once let you block all 900 and 976 number dialing to prevent the huge bills those services likewise resulted in.
The point being, if it was made possible for subscribers to choose not to receive any retrans consent locals just by opting out of the separate but equal basic tier they were compartmentalized into, those subscribers could avoid having any retrans fees appear on their bills. There would be no a la carte involved, as you aren't picking which specific stations you wanted or not; you would be turning on or off a whole category of stations. Being able to tell the cable company "I want all retrans consent stations blocked" would be similar to how the phone companies once let you block all 900 and 976 number dialing to prevent the huge bills those services likewise resulted in.
Last edited:
K.M. Richards
Program Director, The Eighties Channel™
I don't know of any regulation specifying that, so I would guess that channel position on the system is also part of the retrans negotiations.
Read Scott Fybush's post from two days ago. He even straightened out my miss-use of the terms for legal requirements on the carriage of different kinds of local stations.
Here is Scott's post. I have re-read it several times since I was using terms mistakenly... as were all my work colleagues. So don't feel bad about not understanding as lots of us are confused (and that is why we have corporate communications lawyers).
"Must carry" has one very specific meaning in today's regulations. It is one of two choices that every full-power TV station has to make every three years. If a full-power TV station chooses to invoke must-carry, the cable and satellite providers within that station's DMA are required to carry that station's main (x.1) program stream, usually on a low channel number. No money changes hands in that scenario. This choice is thus usually made by stations without big 4 network affiliations.
The other half of the choice, the opposite of "must carry," is "retransmission consent." Stations that choose retrans consent give up their automatic must carry rights in exchange for the ability to negotiate with cable and satellite providers to charge them for the rights to offer NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, Univision, etc. to their customers.
Cable companies cannot cherry-pick affiliates from outside their DMA to offer to their customers except in very specific circumstances where a system has historic carriage of out-of-market signals. Each local station (or really the group owners who dominate "local" TV) now has specific contractual terms with their networks that license them to provide network content only within their own DMA.
This has all changed dramatically within the last decade or so because of an underlying economic change in how local TV operates. Local stations no longer receive compensation from their networks to carry network programming, as was the case into the 1990s. The current scheme is "reverse compensation," in which the local station pays the network for the programming.
In an environment in which local advertising sales are plummeting, how do local stations survive and profit? That's why retrans consent is so important. It has become the largest source of revenue growth for the companies that own local stations, which in turn is driving consolidation, because it stands to reason that a Nexstar or Sinclair or Gray has maximum leverage against Spectrum or Comcast when it can pull hundreds of stations off the platform at once.
How much has it changed? At least based on some recent FCC filings, the average cable bill now includes close to $20 a month in retrans for local stations, a number that was about $1 a month as recently as 2011. Consumers can't opt out of local channels and the price tag that goes with them. All they can do is switch providers (if choices are available) or dump cable/satellite. And the OTT streamers (YouTube TV, Hulu with live TV, Sling, etc) also include retrans consent fees, the only difference being that those retrans negotiations are done directly with each network on behalf of its affiliates. There's also no must carry for the OTT services.
Does that all make sense in the context of 2025? Even a knowledge base from a decade ago doesn't really help to understand the industry as it goes through the most dramatic changes of any of our lifetimes so far.
I guess Scott did a better job of straightening you out than I did.🤣🤣🤣
I spent several decades in the belly of the broadcast TV beast, but got out before revenue started collapsing and retrans fees went bonkers.💸💸💸 Very different world today.