FCC's Carr Moves to Help TV Stations on Ownership. But is Washington Too Late with a Helping Hand?
FCC Chairman wants to replace the rigid 39% cap with a flexible, case-by-case approach to determine whether a TV station transaction will serve the public interest. FCC to vote on Carr's plan Aug. 6
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FCC: Regulated TV stations cheered the news about FCC Chairman Brendan Carr’s latest attempt to help them avoid suffocation from giant, unregulated Big Tech. Carr says he wants to eliminate the 39% cap that pins down Nexstar and Sinclair on ownership while Google, Apple, Netflix, and Amazon can roam the video marketplace largely without restriction on scale. “These rules were last updated before Netflix streamed a single movie, before the first iPhone, and before Instagram existed, and they continue to single out local broadcasters based on a competitive landscape that disappeared with the VCR,” Nexstar said in a July 15 statement. Carr’s approach is to replace a rigid 39% TV household reach cap with a softer one that calls for a case-by-case review of big TV station mergers to assess their public interest value. But Washington regulators, going back decades before Carr saw power, may have waited too long to try to rescue an industry at a time when regionally confined Nexstar pulls in about $5 billion annually and global Amazon collects the same amount about every 60 hours. (More after paywall)
