Are you a shareholder in either company ? If so, request the information. If you're not, find someone who is and have them ask. Your thinking that shareholders have a "right to know" is no different than the examples I gave.... Shareholders, whether you like it or not, don't have access to all aspects of business.
Cause they don't want us to know how much both of them are taking home. BTW I cleaned that up a lot from what I really feel.
I respect what you're saying. I just don't think it's as simple as you're making out. For example, let's say stations x, y, and z are in a market. Station x has a dispute with a provider and gets pulled. You (and others) want the provider to pull in the network feed from station a in a neighboring market. Sounds good. But what do you do when station a and station z runs the same syndicated program(s)? Does the provider now need to look at getting the affiliate from a different market, one that doesn't have any syndication conflicts? What about commercial conflicts? As I understand it, commercials are contracted to run in certain markets.
Actually less of that these days as many are coming via fiber link. D* is getting it that way from a station I worked at in Amarillo. I had to help tie our signal into their fiber panel. E* got their signal via fiber that went to a location down the street that did pick up the OTA via antenna. So it depends entirely on the station as to which takes place. By now I would think that at least half the stations are tied in via fiber.
Probably. Our local cable company (TW) has at least 3/4 getting to them via fiber, but TW owns the fiber. What's expensive is renting the fiber. I would guess no more than 25% (and that's being generous) of affiliates are feeding D* or E* via fiber.
I've been to the D* reception point a number of times. Like I said, they get 1/5 via fiber, the rest OTA. They all get muxed together, then sent via fiber (primary & backup) to Cheyenne (or wherever HQ is is). I've never been to E*, but I know they're not colocated with a station, so that makes getting the signals via fiber expensive.
That's a good idea. I wonder if providers could use this as a negotiating tool... "we'll give you statistics on what people are watching in exchange for a lower fee per subscriber." Let's think outside the box.
Do any locals transmit the collected signals via satellite to the providers ? I'm positive that's what I was told happens here...
You can be certain that Dish, Directv, and the cablecos use the viewing data that they collect via their set-tops in negotiations !
Pretty sure not. However, I do think DirecTV uses a Ka licence at 101 for the purpose of locals backhaul in remote areas, but I think it is DirecTV that uplinks them from the OTA collection site, not the locals themselves. Although in some cases, they may outsource this to one particular local to do it for all stations in the market.
