American Television Alliance Committed to Working with Congress on Retransmission Consent Reform 

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The American Television Alliance (ATVA) issued a statement following the Energy & Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications and Technology hearing yesterday entitled “TV Timeout: Understanding Sports Media Rights.”

“At yesterday’s hearing on sports television, Rob Thun of ATVA Member DIRECTV, said that putting sports on broadcast television ‘doesn’t mean everybody gets local sports for free.’ He pointed out that the vast majority of people still get their local stations through pay-TV providers. Thun observed that broadcasters charge every single pay-TV customer lots of money to receive these signals–despite the Broadcast representative’s claims to the subcommittee that they are ‘free,’” said ATVA spokesperson Cora Mandy. “Mr. Thun is exactly right.  Broadcast stations aren’t free.  They’re too expensive, in part because they’ve spent so much money on sports rights.  Something has to change–and that change should start with retransmission consent reform.”

Large programmers charge all subscribers high prices, whether they care about sport programming or not, in addition to offering sports on their own direct-to-consumer platforms. This requires people to either pay twice for sports they can already get on our Member Company platforms or cobble together “packages” of many different streaming services to get programming no longer available on pay-TV.

ATVA remains committed to working with Congress to reform retransmission consent so that reasonably priced sports programming is available to all who want it.

To learn more about outdated broadcast regulations and their impact on the American consumer, visit https://americantelevisionalliance.org/about-the-issue/.