I won't venture any guesses about must-carry but under the current interpretations of copyright law I would think any newly purchased spectrum also effectively has retrans consent rights. That is, cable or satellite could likely not pirate any signal from those new channels without permission.
- Tom Craig Birkmaier wrote:
At 11:04 AM -0500 3/7/07, Bob Miller wrote:You mean that the new owners will not have gotten the spectrum for free and therefore cannot use it like broadcasters do and provide free OTA programming.No. I mean that they will have a different cost basis for operations - that they will need to recover the cost of the spectrum IN ADDITION to the operating and programming costs that broadcasters must recover.Furthermore, this spectrum will NOT come with must carry/retransmission consent rights, which means that the new operators will not have millions in subscriber fee payments each year to help pay the bills, UNLESS they charge fees for the services they deliver via this spectrum.None of this rules out free services, it just means that the new spectrum users will operate at a disadvantage relative to the broadcasters who get the spectrum for free and get retrans fees as well.Regards Craig ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways:- Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.
-- Tom Barry trbarry@xxxxxxxxxxx ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways:- Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org
- By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.
