Broadcast CEOs Talk VMPVDs, Ownership, ATSC 3.0 at NAB NYC

NEW YORK -- Regulatory opposition to media consolidation is more religion than policy, the conflict over virtual MVPDs is an existential threat for local news, and 5G broadcast is an inferior technology, said broadcast executives at the NAB Show New York Wednesday during TVNewsCheck’s TV2025: Monetizing the Future Conference. Creating artificial competition in markets that can’t sustain it results in worse newsrooms and poor job conditions for journalists, said Sinclair CEO Chris Ripley. It's “challenging” to see any regulatory relief on media ownership coming from the current FCC administration, he said. “I think it's very difficult from a sustainability standpoint to have four to five or six producers of news in a single market,” said Allen Media CEO Princell Hair.

At the height of the newspaper publishing, most markets had one or two suppliers of local news, Ripley said. “If consolidation [of TV news] was allowed to happen, there would immediately be a much better product,” he said. The artificial competition makes for lower pay and a heavier workload for journalists, Ripley said. Graham Media CEO Catherine Badalamente said that broadcast newsroom recruiting needs to improve and that the industry previously tolerated “a lot of bad behavior,” while Hair said that news producers are now being asked to do a lot more than they once did.

Broadcaster conflicts with networks over the use of their content on streaming services must be resolved for broadcasting to survive, executives said. Graham Media has the No. 1 station in Jacksonville, but Hulu doesn't carry the station, said Badalamente. “They can just decide they don’t need to carry us and that really is the issue.” Though the conflict over vMVPDs is often framed as a compensation matter, it also includes issues of carriage and the availability of local content, she said. All distribution is moving to virtual, and if the content issue isn’t resolved, broadcast stations and local news will cease to exist, Ripley said. NAB, which has members on both the network and affiliate side, should get involved in the matter, said Hair. “They absolutely have to resolve this.”

All the executives denounced the idea that linear TV was on the way out. Allen Media Chairman Byron Allen’s public angling to purchase ABC’s owned stations is evidence that Allen believes in the broadcast model, Hair said. Broadcast-style linear content isn’t going away, it's just being offered both digitally and over the air, Ripley said. “Linear is as popular as ever, we just call it FAST [free ad-supported streaming television],” he said. Direct-to-consumer models such as streaming services are expensive to offer and are increasingly being bundled together, Ripley said. The media industry is moving to a “great rebundling” that will include linear offerings, he said.

The transition to ATSC 3.0 is “no doubt moving slower than everyone wanted it to,” but recent news on LG pausing 3.0 TV productions, consumer complaints about digital rights management, and buzz about competing tech 5G broadcast are only temporary bumps in the road, said Ripley and executives from Sinclair’s 3.0-focused subsidiary One Media. Those matters are not going to influence the work of the current FCC-NAB task force on 3.0 (called The Future of TV Initiative), said Jerry Fritz, One Media executive vice president-strategic and legal affairs. Both Ripley and One Media President Mark Aitken said 5G broadcast was an “inferior” tech that would represent a step backward from ATSC 3.0. Frank “SuperFrank” Copsidas, of 5G broadcast company XGen Network, told us the technologies “have very different uses” and “there is definitely room for both.” “I don’t know why it’s ever one against each other; they really complement each other,” he said.