Craig Birkmaier wrote: > Competition is nearly impossible when a few powerful > companies use the legal force of government to > preserve and protect an oligopoly or monopoly. Can you be more specific? What govt reg is preventing an affiliated OTA station from airing the productions of small, local producers, say off prime time, instead of infomercials? I mean, other than a simple business decision of that station (wanting to maximize revenues), what's preventing this? You seem to be against business using a simple profit motive. Like in these two quotes: > The local broadcasters is going to take the MOST > PROFITABLE way out. Benovolence to independent > producers is not a trait one associates with > broadcasters. and > Even if you could buy a station, you are at the mercy > of the programming oligopoly for content that will > attract a meaningful audience. So what? What makes this any different from any other business? And more importantly, how is govt forcing stations to operate any differently from any other large scale business? The small independent station has to consider the taste of the masses to get a large audience, or remain a niche station catering to the few. And risk going out of business. "Most profitable" and "benevolence is not a trait" are the common denominators of all non-charitable businesses, are they not? > Perhaps the best comparison I can offer is what is > happening in the music business. We are seeing more > and more artists choosing to go direct, selling CDs > out of the trunk of their car (or their website) > when they do live performances. Some even encourage > file sharing to help make their music more popular. Exactly. And there's nothing the large-scale music business can do to stop this. Similarly, as Tom points out, a film producer can use the Internet and unicast file transfers to get his stuff out there. TV is a large scale, mass medium. It takes a large scale, mass audience to operate TV profitably. The payoffs are big if you can get on TV, and that's probably what most aspiring producers are looking for, ultimately. I think the same applies to film studios and movie theater chains. As far as I can tell, to use a scarce resource such as RF spectrum set aside for TV, you need to be a large scale outfit. I don't find anything wrong with this. Bert ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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.