![]() Representatives for Nexstar Media Group and Mission Broadcasting did not reply to a request to comment for this article. Journalist and media expert Matthew Keys told the Prospect that “Nexstar has to report income from Mission and White Knight on its SEC reports because they’re so intertwined.” Keys suggested there are a number of other red flags suggesting legal gimmickry, such as the fact that the headquarters for Mission-a broadcast group that allegedly runs 26 separate stations-is located in a strip mall in rural Texas. In addition to recycling content and sharing staff, DirecTV alleges that Nexstar has gone a step further in exploiting this loophole by effectively negotiating the carriage rates for the stations it informally controls at White Knight and Mission as a package with the stations it formally owns. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that Nexstar, the nation’s largest television station owner, has circumvented federal broadcast ownership laws by exerting de facto control over White Knight and Mission Broadcasting Corporations-two legally independent entities whose stations are all entirely controlled by Nexstar through service agreements. Last March, one such dispute led DirecTV to challenge de facto ownership schemes-known as service agreements-in federal court. These disputes have led to a series of so-called “blackouts” as DirecTV negotiates carriage rates with each broadcast conglomerate, the most recent of which is an ongoing blackout involving 64 stations owned by mammoth broadcast company Tegna, across 51 different media markets. But cord-cutting has led cable companies to retrench, seeking to lower carriage fees just as the station owners want to surge them higher. With cable television increasingly a wasteland of reruns, local stations have grown in importance, and their controlling owners can command a bigger premium for access. This de facto ownership is giving station owners the power to demand much higher carriage rates from cable providers than in years past. Increased broadcast deregulation over the past two decades has created station ownership conglomerates that hold large shares of stations in highly concentrated metro television markets. In the process, the dispute has revealed the lengths broadcasting giants are willing to go to to own a market. ![]() The case tests whether there is any might left to the station ownership caps the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has gradually rendered obsolete. ![]() A disagreement between DirecTV and media giant Nexstar over carriage for local television stations, one of the few areas where cable has competitive advantages over streaming companies, has snowballed into an antimonopoly trial. In honor of the new Monopoly header that I made, here’s a clip of a game of Strip Monopoly – the version not endorsed by Hasbro.Fresh from its partial spin-off from AT&T, satellite cable provider DirecTV is taking aggressive steps to bring down carriage rates-the retransmission fees they pay to reproduce the content found on local airwaves. Many of the streets are still there, so the next time you go to A.C and you blow all your cash, you can then take your own Monopoly driving tour for FREE! Just a word to the wise – don’t pull a Clark Griswold and ask a random stranger to give you directions back onto the Expressway. I’m sure there are still at least a few folks out there who have no idea that many of the streets and a couple of the railroad lines on the classic Monopoly board were named after ones that actually existed in Atlantic City during the time the game was conceived in the 1930’s. Monopoly is said to be the most played board game in the world. ![]()
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