Now, comes news that Comcast, one of the largest and richest cable television and broadband providers in the US is a player to purchase and contol NBC Universal.  This is quite disturbing to the 7 year old inside of me.

I grew up without pay tv, until my father got DirecTV 3 months before I left for college.  My media influence centered on free, over the air, ad-supported TV and Radio.  Both are businesses destroyed by options from paid pipelines like cable, as well as legal and pirated content available online.  Where is TV?  Where is the spirit displayed by Weird Al Yancovic in UHF?

NBC made a bold move this year by programming Jay Leno at 10PM.  This is the beginning of the end of the diverse, 60 year history of broadcast network television.  The dual revenue streams of subscriptions and advertising are something that broadcast TV can’t compete with.  ESPN has become the self proclaimed “worldwide leader in sports” for this reason.  Their most recent acquisition was the college football Bowl Championship Series, which is moving from Fox and ABC to ESPN.  Broadcast can’t compete.

Currently, the FCC prohibits one company from owning broadcast TV stations AND cable systems.  Expect a potential Comcast deal to have General Electric be the sole owner of the NBC stations, with GE’s majority stake in NBCU turned into a minority ownership, with Comcast in charge.  Would the FCC even allow this?  It is quite a dangerous precedent.  NBC made a bold move a few years ago acquiring the #2 US Spanish language broadcaster Telemundo.  Will that momentum fall apart?  Is Telemundo more valuable than My Network TV?

The digital transition has come and gone.  It has left a lot of unprofitable TV stations with fancy new technology.  A merger between NBCU and Comcast essentially concedes that broadcast TV is dead.

What do you think?  Am I being too hard?  Is this just Comcast’s way of keeping that cash machine known as Joel McHale in the family?  Discuss.

The FCC, under Democratic leadership since Barack Obama became President, is preaching open access to communication.  This is clearly a very different approach than how the commission operated during the Bush administration.

Clearly, the defining moment of the FCC during Bush’s reign can be summed up by two words: Janet Jackson.  The 2004 incident, which took place during the Super Bowl halftime show, resulted in Jackson’s bare breast being shown, albeit for a very brief moment.  The FCC chose to fine CBS, because it was “indecent”.  Most news from the FCC during this era was about fining broadcasters for indecency, although there never were (and still currently isn’t) specific guidelines on what by law is considered decent or indecent.  This was a large part of Howard Stern’s rhetoric, to the point where he took his highly rated radio show and moved it to Sirius Satellite radio, to greater freedom of speech, but a significantly smaller listener base.

The FCC is now working to make sure that content isn’t blocked, unlike the previous administration, which sought out to block content.

Do you think that there should be concrete decency/indecency standards?  Should broadband providers be allowed to block content it doesn’t approve of (like P2P servers)?  Discuss.