Latest Dish News Blackout ???

Gdetrailer wrote:

Dutch_12078 wrote:
The FCC or Congress could stop these retransmission disputes from using the viewers as hostages by allowing the service providers to use out of market stations during blackouts.

:R

You do realize that FCC AND Congress ALLOWED this to happen by changing the rules/laws to allow OTA TV stations to DEMAND "payment" to those stations in order for Cable AND Satellite providers to be able to rebroadcast those Stations?

Station owners felt they were being "cheated" out of revenue as Cable and Sat markets grew and lobbied to get a ruling in favor of the TV station owners..

Additionally, you do realize that in most areas of the US you CAN also BYPASS the dish or cable and view the OTA channels DIRECTLY without the middle man?

Just takes a OTA antenna and flipping your TV to OTA channels.. Not impossible and you WILL get a much better pix in full HD (you only get SD OTA channel quality on Dish)..

Not to mention using OTA you get the additional SUBCHANNELS of each OTA broadcast channel.. Dish does not provide those channels and I suspect neither does Direct or most cable systems..

Of course I realize who caused the problem. That's why I said they would have to be the ones to fix it.

If OTA channels were reliably available everywhere there would be no need for the satellite or cable services to carry them. Since that's not the case, we have to live with these periodic outages that will only get worse as the channel owners get greedier. I do have alternate sources available for the networks and most local news is carried online in one or more formats. So for me, the outages are an annoyance, but not a loss.