AT&T big time donor..
https://variety.com/2019/digital/news/att-donates-500000-to-locast-1203256117/
This really isn't all that complex. When the market changes, you can innovate or litigate. The broadcasters have clearly chosen the latter. What complexity there is comes from trying to resuscitate a dying business model with lawyers and political favors. Normal people don't have such options.
I predict that traditional broadcast media will eventually die. Their audience has been declining for decades along with the quality of their content. When the audience dries up, there will be nothing left to monetize.
The broadcasters dont want any type of provider excluding cable companies giving people live access to network tv because they reap millions of not billions in networks fees that we pay. Simple greed.
Same beef they had with Aereo: If they let Locast get away with retransmitting OTA content w/o paying the retrans fees, the subscription TV companies (cable, satellite, streaming) could make the argument they shouldn't have to, either.
What does that matter? Retrans fees are now a major source of income for the broadcasters. If they lose them they'll probably go tango uniform.
I predict they will, eventually, anyway. Once "NextGen TV" (ATSC 3.0) is entrenched and ATSC 1.x phased-out, I expect first they'll begin to DRM their "better" content. Once they do that, the Locast problem will just go away. So will the commskip problem, because so will most DVRs. (The broadcasters have always hated them. Now they'll finally be able to get rid of them.)
Once the market has become accustomed to all that, paywalls will be next.
Oh, and to make all that work, you will have to network invasive, privacy-compromising, and often vulnerable "smart" devices to enable the handshaking necessary to facilitate that stuff.
(My wife and I will no longer be watching "over the air" TV by that point. We're already down to so little OTA TV that I'd never invest again what I have in it. Odds are even we'll never upgrade our HDHR tuner to an ATSC 3.0 model.)
Oh NOES! Not... sports?!?! 
Please do. My wife and I find sports on OTA TV to be primarily an annoyance.
I don't know as it's greed, so much as laziness and survival.
The broadcasters found a cash cow in retrans fees. They no longer had to provide particularly attractive content or woo advertisers. So they stopped doing those things. Now they're utterly dependent upon retrans fees. Take those away and they'd either have to go back to providing content people actually want to watch and convince good-paying advertisers to come back, or go dark.
I suspect they'd go dark.
Exactly so.
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I've never understood the attitude of "well, I don't like it, do whatever you want". Just because your ox gets gored last doesn't mean you escape. I don't like reality shows, but others do, I don't mind, I change the channel!!
I can say, almost for sure, when Locast will finally bite the bullet. Eventually, my city will get it and I will donate. Several weeks later the lawsuits will intensify, and it will be toast within 3 months.
How do I know this? I was the Kiss of Death⢠for Aereo many years ago.
Source: Murphy's Law
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If you're referring to my comment about sports programming: Fair enough, but when was the last time a program you wanted to watch was delayed or preempted by a reality TV show? 
(Not so much a problem anymore. As I noted: We simply don't watch that much OTA TV now. But it used to be a regular occurrence.)
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I hope Locast spanks the broadcasters hard in court! If they do, maybe the broadcasters will have no choice but to do what they should have done in the first place and innovate. That is the only way they will survive in the long run --- and by extension, Locast.
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Agree, but the sad reality is they will be bankrupted out of business by legal bills long before justice comes our way.
I donât know. Locast has some significant financial backing. My bet is that this will come to a legal resolution but I wonât bet on which way it will go.
That would not surprise me in the least. I was an installer for dish and we had a program to install antennas for some customers to avoid re-broadcast fees for them.
Locast is a non-profit. They do not have investors.
Ok. Donators . Att gave them $500.000. I'm sure the people that work for Locast get nice expense accounts.
While they do not have âinvestorsâ per se, both EchoStar/Dish and AT&T/DirecTV have donated not-insignificant amounts of money to Sports Fan Coalition NY (the parent organization of Locast). Also, during sports blackout and carriage negotiations/disputes, Dish and DirecTV actively directed their subscribers to Locast to get around the programming blackouts.
The craziest part is that if Locast wins, and broadcasters start losing retransmission fees, it could bring down the broadcast networks... which would bring down Locast.
The only reasons that Locast is exempt from the retransmission fees are:
- Locastâactually, Sports Fan Coalition NYâis a registered non-profit, not a commercial entity, and
- They are only rebroadcasting in the same DMA that the original broadcast serves.
Because both of these conditions are met, they fall within the FCC exemption set forth in prior case law. This is not some major case that will re-shape the broadcast industry. Rather, this is a group exercising their legal rights stipulated in law, but that is only being used in a novel manner; meaning, rebroadcast over the internet versus low-power antennae.
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This rule
(5)the secondary transmission is not made by a cable system but is made by a governmental body, or other nonprofit organization, without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage, and without charge to the recipients of the secondary transmission other than assessments necessary to defray the actual and reasonable costs of maintaining and operating the secondary transmission service.
I'm not a lawyer, but the direct or indirect commercial advantage could be an issue.
How so? The sole purpose of Locast was to facilitate the viewing of broadcasts that otherwise could not be receivedâurban jungles where buildings interfered with transmission, or users whose geography make reception difficult, such as the lee of foothills. Enabling users who ought to be able to receive free broadcasts but cannot because of how the broadcasters transmit their signal, does not seem to fall under "commercial advantage", although perhaps your definition differs from mine.
Do you think it's out of the goodnesses of their hearts? Yeah they are non profit, but it doesn't mean people can't make a lot of money. Spectrum has a basic cable package for locals it's $25. There is your competitive advantage