[opendtv] Re: The rationale for retrans consent from local broadcasters

  • From: Craig Birkmaier <brewmastercraig@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 06 Oct 2015 22:35:02 -0400


On Oct 6, 2015, at 9:50 PM, Manfredi, Albert E <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Craig Birkmaier wrote:

People bought cable because it was a superior medium. You did not
need tall outside antenna masts and antenna rotators,

This is mostly false. People bought cable because it could carry a lot more
"channels" than were available OTA, and extra sports and movies were a major
reason.

Did you read the next sentence?

You are repeating what I wrote.

You mean, if you went to Blockbuster? Sure. But not delivered to your home
electronically. Your choices for electronic delivery were very limited. OTA
channels or single cable head end.

People went to Blockbuster en mass. The rest is just evolution. Cable was one
of many options to OTA TV. People put up big satellite dishes before DBS.
Now you have more ways to pay for TV, and some catch up services to keep people
interested in live linear TV.

As the President of WGN stated, you need some original content
to get people to come to your service.

And yet people flocked to Netflix even before they were creating their own
content (independent of the congloms, I repeat).

No Bert. By YOUR definition they were 100% dependent on programs they licensed
from the congloms. Now they are only 98% dependent.

Competition usually drives prices down. In this case,
competition is driving prices up,

Prove it. Prove that the new original shows, say from Netflix, cost more to
produce than shows from the major networks.

I did not say that they cost more to produce than the shows from the major
networks. It is worth noting, although I did not say it, that the networks have
an advantage in that they own their own studios.

What I said is that the cost of all shows keeps going up, because the talent
pool is limited and your "competitors" keep bidding up the price of the most
popular content.

Funny, Craig. The "marketplace" that "worked this stuff out" was people
hollering, by the many thousands, to the FCC, to make darned sure the local
monopolies did not go down the path they were already headed on.

There is always a lot of yelling by people who are pushing causes. The reality
is that most of the perceived "abuses" we're just technical provisioning
issues, and the marketplace figuring out how to charge the very real cost of
highly asymmetrical interconnections.





Nor do you need **any** channels in such a world, Craig. I explained this in
my previous post.

In a weird technical sense you are correct. What you suggest is "possible."

But from a practical business sense you are wrong. Live linear TV channels are
not going away - the number of channels will decline because there is not
enough new, original content to fill hundreds of channels. The library content
IS moving online. Both will coexist.


Regards
Craig

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