Brendan Smialowski/Bloomberg News Comcast’s chief, Brian RobertsMany of the country’s biggest television providers have signed on to a petition asking the government to revamp station retransmission rules. Cablevision, Charter, DirecTV, Dish Network, Time Warner Cable and Verizon all joined the coalition of providers and nonprofit groups in signing the petition on Tuesday.
But the nation’s biggest cable company, Comcast, was missing. Comcast finds itself in a peculiar position because it is buying a majority stake in NBC Universal, which owns the NBC broadcast network. “Comcast is conspicuously absent” from the calls for changes “because it expects to be a big beneficiary of retransmission consent before long,” Andrew Jay Schwartzman of the Media Access Project said in an e-mail message.
When asked about the coalition on Wednesday, Comcast said in a statement: “Everyone knows that retransmission consent needs to work better, and most importantly, consumers shouldn’t be held hostage in these disputes. As we’ve said many times, as a company that will be in both the cable and broadcasting businesses, looking at the issue from both sides, we hope we can play a constructive role in working toward a resolution of these issues.”
The providers who did sign the petition said they were trying to prevent the kind of brinkmanship that led ABC to remove its affiliate station from millions of New York area homes hours before the Academy Awards broadcast last Sunday in a dispute with Cablevision.
The petitioners say the current rules governing retransmission are tilted in favor of the broadcasters, and in a letter they called the rules “broken and in need of repair.”
The providers are asking the Federal Communications Commission to allow for the government to step in more firmly during retransmission disputes, using a tool like mandatory arbitration or an “expert tribunal.” They also want the F.C.C. to require stations to keep sending a signal as long as the provider “continues to negotiate in good faith.”