Complete Coverage: 2012 NAB Show
NAB President Gordon Smith took aim at Google and Wiki on
one hand and "some cable operators" on the other Monday in a speech to
broadcasters about the ability of its "ruthless, smart and
well-financed" adversaries/competitors.
Those appeared to include cable operators on the retrans
front and the technology community on the content-protection front.
In a keynote speech to the National Association of
Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas Monday, Smith told his audience that
Google and Wiki had taken a lesson from broadcasters' playbooks to "create
a powerful megaphone to change forever how battles are won, or lost, inside the
Beltway."
And while broadcasters had leveraged their power to protect
TV stations in the spectrum auction debate, he suggested, the Googles and Wikis
had used theirs to change the debate from "thou shalt not steal," to "do
not censor the Internet."
That was a reference to the protests and pressure from
Northern California Internet forces that helped kill two online piracy bills,
SOPA (the Stop Online Protection Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act) that had had
bipartisan support on the Hill.
"The idea behind SOPA and PIPA was simple and
straightforward: Don't steal our creative content," said Smith. "But
it didn't matter. The technology community -- the Googles and Wikis -- used
their medium just as we did -- to create a powerful megaphone to change forever
how battles are won, or lost, inside the Beltway. Like us, they used every tool
at their disposal to sway public opinion."
Smith said that TV stations "deserve to be allowed to
negotiate for compensation of their highly-valued programming," a
reference to the battle over cash-for-carriage retrans payments that have cable
and satellite operators complaining to the FCC. He said those operators don't
want to pay a fair price for local news and broadcast content that is the most
popular fare on cable -- 95 of the top 100 shows on cable are broadcast
retransmissions, he pointed out.
"The other side says the market is broken, but with
nearly all retransmission consent deals being completed successfully, the cable
and satellite lobby's notion of 'market failure' is simply false," he
said.
"The current system is fair and benefits viewers. If it
isn't broken, don't fix it."
He pledged to use every play in the playbook, including on
Capitol Hill, in on-air ads and social media, to protect his members'
interests.
