If you’re still paying for cable TV, you might be seeing a sizable increase this month on your local TV fee paid to broadcasters. In my part of Connecticut that increase is substantial. According to the latest Comcast rate card, that fee is going up over $10 to $48.30 a month! It sits outside any contract pricing, so even subscribers locked into a package are getting hit with this increase.
In my latest video, we take a look at what this fee is all about and how broken the system is.
Comcast publishes very detailed rate cards that break down every charge and bundle for each of the markets they serve. But I can’t access cards from other regions without logging in as a customer. Because of that, I put together a form where viewers can share what they’re seeing locally.
I went back to an older video I made in 2018 where I had pulled this same section from the rate card. At the time, the fee was only $8. In under eight years, that’s a 500 percent increase!
Much of this money is going to large broadcast groups like Nexstar, Sinclair, Gray, and Scripps. Nexstar, for example, is currently asking regulators for permission to grow even larger by taking over Tegna. As more people cancel cable, the subscriber base that funds retransmission consent fees keeps shrinking, and the broadcasters have been raising rates to maintain the revenue they’ve grown accustomed to. Many of these companies now rely on retransmission for half or more of their income, regardless of how many people actually watch their stations.
The natural question is how broadcasters are allowed to keep raising these fees. The answer lies in the retransmission consent framework. Cable companies once had to carry every local station for free under “must-carry,” but court decisions in the 1980s and a 1992 law shifted the landscape. Broadcasters can now choose between must-carry or negotiating a paid consent agreement. Nearly all of them opt for the paid agreement. Cable providers, meanwhile, are required to negotiate in good faith and can’t walk away. Broadcasters, on the other hand, can pull their signals if they’re unhappy, and the cable company can’t replace a local station with the same network from another market. If the ABC affiliate in my area is owned by Nexstar, that’s the one Comcast has to carry—no alternatives.
Cable companies also must place local stations on their most basic tier. Years ago that tier was called “lifeline cable,” but with a $48.30 broadcast fee added on, even a “lifeline” subscription has become expensive.
The FCC is revisiting national broadcast ownership rules, which has drawn in comments from groups across the political spectrum. One proposal from the International Center for Law and Economics argues for eliminating the retransmission consent system entirely and treating broadcasters more like any other content supplier under copyright and contract law. That could allow cable companies to negotiate outside their markets and potentially reduce costs by choosing among multiple affiliates of the same network. It wouldn’t preserve local newscasts, but it could give cable companies some leverage they don’t currently have.
Streaming services like YouTube TV and Hulu are not subject to the same rules that bind cable companies. Broadcasters want that changed, which would likely raise streaming prices as well. Some smaller networks such as Newsmax have raised concerns about consolidation for a different reason: if large broadcast groups force cable operators to carry their affiliated news channels on the basic tier, smaller channels could be pushed off the lineup entirely.
There’s a lot happening at once—shrinking cable audiences, aggressive fee increases, regulatory reviews, and pressure on both distributors and programmers to keep revenue flowing. I’ll continue following these developments. In the meantime, if you have a recent cable rate card, sending it in will help build a clearer picture of what subscribers are facing across the country.
