Cord cutting still subpar

[ncted]

By and large, your understanding is incorrect. Some stations co-op with MVPDs and provide them Internet-based feeds but most still use the old OTA reception model or are using Internet-based feeds that aren't that expensive to deliver. Providing a feed isn't a huge additional expense as they simply break out the channels before they are sent to the multiplexer and send them out on broadband or fiber (often provided by an MVPD).This does not support your assertion that the station is spending money on delivering the goods to MVPD subscribers unless you can show that the station is paying the MVPD for carriage and I think we all know that's the reverse of what's happening.

Perhaps my understanding is incorrect. It is based on information I have read here over the past 14 years. However, just saying it is wrong is not going to convince me. Do you have some trusted source you can share?

As for the second point, you assumed I was saying the cost of retransmission should always go to the station owner. That is not what I was saying. I was saying I expected there would always be a cost to deliver locals without specifying who the money would go to. I can see why you would think that as I also said retransmission fees should not be the stations primary source of revenue, but that was not my intent.

 

[navychop]

OTT customers CANNOT return to satcos or even cablecos if the OTT folks manage to undercut them long enough to destroy their business.

I doubt that will happen, but I believe there are some that hope it WILL.

THEN watch your costs go up! And no central EPG, and maybe no “forever” DVR.


Sent from my iPhone using SatelliteGuys

 

[harshness]

Perhaps my understanding is incorrect. It is based on information I have read here over the past 14 years.

While some reason that signals must come via "wire", they are always informed otherwise. This is the same line of reasoning that leads to the even more popularly held position that OTA is something relatively new and until recently you had to subscribe to a service to get local television channels. The MVPDs are more than happy to not trouble themselves with dispelling this silly notion.

Some OTA channels are gathered by "wired" feeds but many, if not most are still hauled in via antennas at some "point of presence" that may be shared by multiple MVPDs.

As for the second point, you assumed I was saying the cost of retransmission should always go to the station owner.

In that you were defending retrans fees that the stations demand to compensate them for some cost that they are incurring can scarcely be taken any other way.

Maybe the station provides the power to run the equipment but it doesn't take a whole lot of energy or technology (just a router and a modem) to send an small number of MPEG streams down a fiber or out through the Internet proper. Is that something they should be paid dollars a month per household for?

 

[ncted]

n that you were defending retrans fees that the stations demand to compensate them for some cost that they are incurring can scarcely be taken any other way.

That is not what I wrote. Feel free to re-read it: Cord cutting still subpar

 

[ncted]

Maybe the station provides the power to run the equipment but it doesn't take a whole lot of energy or technology (just a router and a modem) to send an small number of MPEG streams down a fiber or out through the Internet proper. Is that something they should be paid dollars a month per household for?

My understanding from the sales people I've had to deal with at telcos over the years is they use leased lines with SLAs for uptime for this, and not the open Internet. WRAL, a local station had several going to various MVPDs as recently as 2014. Perhaps that has changed, but I wouldn't want to rely on the unpredictable nature of the Internet to send live content that generates a large portion of my revenue if I were a station owner.

 

[harshness]

My understanding from the sales people I've had to deal with at telcos over the years is they use leased lines with SLAs for uptime for this, and not the open Internet.

This line of reasoning assumes that the station is footing the bill for the leased lines and that doesn't seem like a reasonable assumption. Further, falling back on an OTA system should be more than sufficient to cover any "instability" inherent in the modern Internet.

Regardless of who is paying, does it really cost dollars a month per household to accomplish these feat? Point-to-point private "Ethernet" connections don't cost tens of thousands of dollars where I live. I can get a connection to a location that is 300alm away for around $600/month and I'm sure local connections are much less expensive. Spread this out over tens of thousands of subscribers that it isn't much of a blip on the RADAR.

So why the increasing retransmission fees going to the stations?

 

[ncted]

This line of reasoning assumes that the station is footing the bill for the leased lines and that doesn't seem like a reasonable assumption. Further, falling back on an OTA system should be more than sufficient to cover any "instability" inherent in the modern Internet.

Regardless of who is paying, does it really cost dollars a month per household to accomplish these feat? Point-to-point private "Ethernet" connections don't cost tens of thousands of dollars where I live. I can get a connection to a location that is 300alm away for around $600/month and I'm sure local connections are much less expensive. Spread this out over tens of thousands of subscribers that it isn't much of a blip on the RADAR.

So why the increasing retransmission fees going to the stations?

No it doesn't. I agree with you on that point, and have from the start. It should be pennies per station in most markets. We, the viewer, should only have to pay for the retransmission costs, and they should be small, no matter who incurs them.

 

[harshness]

No it doesn't. I agree with you on that point, and have from the start. It should be pennies per station in most markets. We, the viewer, should only have to pay for the retransmission costs, and they should be small, no matter who incurs them.

And that's the problem. The broadcaster is collecting the ever-increasing fees from the MVPD and you can bet that they're not sharing it with anyone. The MVPD is usually prohibited from importing service from another broadcaster and if they broke the contract with one station, the others would surely get uppity in solidarity.

Retransmission costs appear to have nothing to do with cost of delivery (since they are charged by the broadcaster and not the MVPD) so lending the fees any of your support seems unwarranted.

I see retransmission on the part of the MVPD as a basic necessity of subscription TV service and not something that I should have to pay them for. Obviously, a cord cutter wouldn't because most of them can't get access to their local channels through the OTT services even if they wanted to. The typical cord cutter will fall back on the argument that they don't need to see locally produced programming and that's a questionable claim at best.

 

[Ronnie-]

Obviously, a cord cutter wouldn't because most of them can't get access to their local channels through the OTT services even if they wanted to.

Most of them? What info is this based on?

At the rate these services have been adding local channels and markets, Sling Tv aside, the other major players have pretty decent local market coverage on at least some of the channels in the markets they service.

(this chart is a few months old and I know some markets have been added since it was done. )

See if your local TV stations can be seen on your streaming provider

 

[harshness]

If everyone was using one of the providers that has a list price of less than or equal to $40, that would be an argument. As it is, if you don't have access to OTA, you're probably going to have to subscribe to some sort of service that is charging $40 now and ride them up as they add more channels and more dollars to their monthly fees.

 

[Ronnie-]

I was simply pointing out that your statement that I quoted above was not accurate at this time. Last year it would have been.
With the rate they are adding them, a few (hulu and yttv) will offer locals in markets comparable to other traditional options in the very near future.

 

[Zookster]

OTT customers CANNOT return to satcos or even cablecos if the OTT folks manage to undercut them long enough to destroy their business.

I doubt that will happen, but I believe there are some that hope it WILL.

THEN watch your costs go up! And no central EPG, and maybe no “forever” DVR.


Sent from my iPhone using SatelliteGuys

"Satcos" would only have themselves to blame if they went out of business, just like other businesses that didn't adapt to the paradigm shift created by the online digital world. The book industry and music industries were the first major media formats to have to adjust, and both have survived, though the marketplace is of course now dominated by online retailers rather than brick-and-mortar. Now TV/movie studios and content providers need to adapt.

Whether these changes are good or bad is the subject of endless debate, and any views will ultimately be subjective depending on the person's preferred means of consuming content. (Folks who liked to browse vinyl records in record stores are now SOL, but people who like to instantly buy a song on a device they are connected to constantly have nothing to complain about.)

But in the case of "satcos," we're dealing with companies whose prices (like health care and college tuition) have jumped, year in and year out, way above the rate of inflation. Just like the ubiquitousness of digital music formats put pressure on the music industry to keep prices consistent and stable, we will hopefully see something similar in the world of TV providers.

I'm well aware that the current pricing of OTT live TV service represents a "loss leader" approach to driving business to an emergent service model, and that they will continue to creep up closer, but never be quite reach, satco pricing for comparable channel selection, features, and access (mainly because they won't have the same overhead and aren't a monopoly in the service area and have to price themselves competitively). For satcos to survive, they need to offer skinny bundle packages that include channels consumers most want (top 50 cable TV channels, including sports, plus locals), cloud DVR functionality, and access on any device (including outside the home) without charging $10-$20 extra per point of access (in the form of box rental/service mirroring fees or "whole home" premium-priced access).

 

[ncted]

And that's the problem. The broadcaster is collecting the ever-increasing fees from the MVPD and you can bet that they're not sharing it with anyone. The MVPD is usually prohibited from importing service from another broadcaster and if they broke the contract with one station, the others would surely get uppity in solidarity.

Retransmission costs appear to have nothing to do with cost of delivery (since they are charged by the broadcaster and not the MVPD) so lending the fees any of your support seems unwarranted.

I agree it is a problem, so please stop trying to sell me on it just because my perspective is slightly different than yours. That said, I live in the real world so I expect I will pay for what I receive. If it costs someone 5 cents to deliver my local station to me, I expect that be included in my monthly cost. I do not consider it unwarranted, and I do not believe there are no expenses incurred. Heck, the lawyers and accountants alone... Look, we disagree on this point. So what? Whatever.

I worked for over a dozen years in media (although not in distribution), and I can tell you the idea that cost of content delivery would just get lumped into the "cost of doing business" is about as foreign an idea as you could imagine. They know down to the fraction of a penny how much it costs them for each set of eyeballs, and they are going to claw back that expense any way they can. The fact that they try to monetize it doesn't surprise me, but it does disgust me, and I am glad to no longer be in the business. The MBAs have taken over in most stations/media empires, and the results are not pretty. Let's just enjoy our shared distaste for the realities of the retransmission business and leave it at that. What do you say?

 

[harshness]

I agree it is a problem, so please stop trying to sell me on it just because my perspective is slightly different than yours. That said, I live in the real world so I expect I will pay for what I receive. If it costs someone 5 cents to deliver my local station to me, I expect that be included in my monthly cost.

Alas, what the MVPDs are doing is passing through the largely unjustified "retransmission fees" so you can't logically hold a position that the fees are justified. It should be the broadcasters paying the MVPDs, not the other way around. What is for sale is eyeballs and the MVPD is providing them. The content is supposed to be paid for by the ridiculous amount of advertising that comes peppered in with the content. It is a matter of fairness and it is patently unfair to pretty much everyone that the stations are dinging us two different ways.

That the actual process of retransmission is not costing anywhere near the dollars per household per month that the stations are charging the carriers for it (it can't even be considered a reasonable markup) and it is just another fee that makes selling subscriptions harder and makes going around the station through OTT services like the networks themselves, Hulu and Netflix that much more attractive and drawing eyeballs away from the local broadcast of the content (and logically the target eyeballs). I think economists call that "shooting onself in the foot".

Retransmission fees should be paid by the broadcaster for access to thousands of pairs of eyeballs. It shouldn't be something that we as customers have to concern ourselves with.

If the situation were set straight and the stations were paying for the eyeballs gained, you can bet they wouldn't be paying dollars per station to the carriers for expanding their audience.

 

[ncted]

Alas, what the MVPDs are doing is passing through the largely unjustified "retransmission fees" so you can't logically hold a position that the fees are justified. It should be the broadcasters paying the MVPDs, not the other way around. What is for sale is eyeballs and the MVPD is providing them. The content is supposed to be paid for by the ridiculous amount of advertising that comes peppered in with the content. It is a matter of fairness and it is patently unfair to pretty much everyone that the stations are dinging us two different ways.

That the actual process of retransmission is not costing anywhere near the dollars per household per month that the stations are charging the carriers for it (it can't even be considered a reasonable markup) and it is just another fee that makes selling subscriptions harder and makes going around the station through OTT services like the networks themselves, Hulu and Netflix that much more attractive and drawing eyeballs away from the local broadcast of the content (and logically the target eyeballs). I think economists call that "shooting onself in the foot".

Retransmission fees should be paid by the broadcaster for access to thousands of pairs of eyeballs. It shouldn't be something that we as customers have to concern ourselves with.

If the situation were set straight and the stations were paying for the eyeballs gained, you can bet they wouldn't be paying dollars per station to the carriers for expanding their audience.

While that sounds nice, that isn't the way this market works -- whether through natural market forces, where the content is worth more to the MVPDs' customers than the eyeballs are to the station owners, or through legislative and/or regulatory interference, where the station owners lobby was more successful than the MVPDs' lobby was, or both.

 

[NYDutch]

According to one station sales manager I've talked to, one of the problems the local stations are dealing with is the increasing demands from the networks they're affiliated with for a larger piece of the retrans fees.

 

[Juan]

According to one station sales manager I've talked to, one of the problems the local stations are dealing with is the increasing demands from the networks they're affiliated with for a larger piece of the retrans fees.

Networks used to PAY local stations

Sent from my SM-G950U using the SatelliteGuys app!

 

[NYDutch]

Networks used to PAY local stations

Sent from my SM-G950U using the SatelliteGuys app!

They still do in the sense that network programs usually have insertion points for local advertising. As far as I know though, there have pretty much always been affiliate fees paid to the network.

 

[Juan]

They still do in the sense that network programs usually have insertion points for local advertising. As far as I know though, there have pretty much always been affiliate fees paid to the network.

not in the Golden days circa 1980

 

[Juan]

not in the Golden days circa 1980

before cable