By David Shepardson
March 30 (Reuters) – Major broadcast station owners said on Monday that U.S. regulators should address the trend of Big Tech companies acquiring the rights to broadcast football, baseball and other sporting events, saying it could weaken local TV news.
Major broadcast companies filed comments with the Federal Communications Commission ahead of a comment deadline on Friday.
The FCC opened a review into the growing shift of live sports to pay TV and subscription services away from broadcast networks, seeking comment on actions the agency “could take to ensure continued access by viewers to live sports through free over-the-air broadcast TV.”
Fox Corp said free TV viewers could eventually lose access to the World Series, Thanksgiving NFL football games or the Olympics, citing “a world where Big Tech acquires more and more broadcast sports rights – often as a loss leader to support other massive, vertically integrated businesses that primarily profit off of the personal consumption data of its customers.”
Another major station owner, Sinclair, told the FCC: “Without high-value live sports on broadcast television, local broadcast journalism will suffer.”
The National Association of Broadcasters said global streaming giants like Amazon Prime, Alphabet, Apple, and Netflix were able to use live sports programming as a loss leader.
The NFL, which did not immediately comment on Monday, said in February that more than 87% of its games are aired on free broadcast TV and that all games are aired on free broadcast television in markets of participating teams.
The FCC noted that in 1961 the National Football League entered into a two-year rights agreement with CBS for $9.8 million and that, by comparison, recent NFL media-rights deals are worth more than $10 billion per year.
A 1961 law exempts major sports leagues from antitrust laws and allows them to pool their individual teams’ television rights and sell those rights as a package.
Fox questioned if the law should apply to sports leagues’ negotiations with paywalled streamers.
The FCC noted the NFL has media-rights agreements with ABC parent Walt Disney, CBS parent Paramount, Fox, NBCUniversal, NFL Network, Amazon and Google and that the league stands to bring in over $100 billion in sports rights fees over the life of the deals.
The FCC said many sporting events previously available through free broadcast or traditional cable TV packages are now available only through standalone subscription streaming, which has frustrated many sports fans.
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Chris Reese and Deepa Babington)
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