The National Association of Broadcasters has again told the FCC that the agency needs to extend the UHF discount from the 39% national audience reach cap to all VHF stations as well, saying even that overstates their actual audience reach.
But while it said the FCC should reject the pay TV industry's "self-serving arguments supporting the disparate regulation of TV broadcasters," it does not address many of its own members' call for disparate treatment in a separate filing.
In its reply comments on the FCC's inquiry into the cap and 50% UHF discount, the NAB focused on pay TV industry comments that the cap should be retained and the UHF discount eliminated, but did not address the broadcast TV affiliate associations' request that the FCC effectively double the cap for them, but not for network-owned stations. The last time affiliates and network-owned stations squared off over the cap, it fractured the association.
But the NAB has plenty of other targets -- cable operators, satellite operators -- and stuck with taking aim at various pay TV arguments.
The NAB said, for example, that the pay TV industry's allegations of excessive retrans bargaining power are misplaced, suggesting that highly concentrated MVPDs, with their dual control of the pay TV pipeline and broadband access, are the real power brokers.
"[R]ather than TV stations being able to play multiple distributors against one another, as Dish asserts, in reality TV stations prefer to -- indeed must –- reach retransmission agreements with all major pay TV providers to ensure their accessibility to as many viewers as possible," the NAB said.
And to the Writers Guild of America comment that consolidation equates to a decline in diversity of content, and that broadcasters are the dominant provider, the NAB said that is from an alternative universe.
The NAB said TV stations have limited effective reach and only a fraction of the potential audience. Given that changed landscape, even discounting half of the "theoretical 100% audience reach...overstates their effective audience," the organization added.
And while the NAB conceded local TV news is a trusted news source relied on by "many," it said that reliance has declined in the face of competition from many other news sources, particularly digital ones that other commenters failed even to take into account.
