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If you hear the sound of dueling banjos wafting over the broadcast landscape, that’s networks and affiliates warming up for a fight.
The first salvo came from the affiliates, who less than two weeks ago launched the Coalition for Local News to reassert themselves in the long-simmering debate over who should be allowed to negotiate retransmission consent rights with the vMVPDs.
Owning to longstanding FCC rules, broadcasters hold all the cards there, and the affiliates have let it be known that doesn’t hold water with them any longer. To make their case, they’ve drawn a direct line between that potential vMVPD revenue funneling mostly to the networks as potentially impairing to their ability to produce local news.
Now a second coalition representing the networks and at least one vMVPD, the Preserve Viewer Choice Coalition, has emerged. Its position is that things are perfectly fine as they are, and they’re drawing a line between affiliates getting those negotiation rights directly to impeding viewer choices on the streaming landscape.
Bryce Harlow is a veteran lobbyist from the broadcast industry tapped to speak for the networks’ coalition. In this Talking TV conversation, he lays out its rationale and speakers to the broader implications of a growing internecine conflict within broadcasting.
Episode transcript below, edited for clarity.
Michael Depp: Just last week on this podcast, we chatted with Tanya Vea, a station group executive at Bonneville International, and one of the spokespeople for the newly formed Coalition for Local News. The coalition, which