Note that Tom Delay of all people (remember that guy? I'm old and I'd say barely) wrote an opposing op ed saying that even though he supports the change that this is contrary to the governing statute that he helped write, which explicitly bars the FCC from changing this limit
If this Baltimore Sun article is accurate, it's worse than that as it sounds like the FCC is overriding a law passed by Congress and not just (re)setting a rule.
> The 39% cap was established by Congress in 2004.
> In a 2-1 vote, the FCC repealed a 22-year-old rule holding that a company cannot own stations that reach more than a combined 39% of the U.S. television audience.
This seems like a very odd rule. What about things like CNN? Aren't they available to 100% of households?
The FCC mainly regulates broadcast. CNN is cable. Also, there's a difference between a station being in more than 39% of households and being 39% of the total market. Other stations still compete with CNN.
Broadcast TV seems laughably irrelevant. It’s difficult to find official numbers, but under 1% of US households have no cable, satellite TV, home Internet, or a cell phone. The latter two are how people consume video and TV to a large degree today.
In exchange, we have a great deal of spectrum tied up for terrestrial TV, much of which goes to running infomercials or else is surreptitiously leased for terrestrial data broadcasts. And the government gets to decide to regulate it so it becomes inherently politicised - like favouring certain owners.
Realistically - this spectrum should simply be reassigned for IP based services, with perhaps some set aside for non profit / educational uses, some for commercial, etc.
(Radio is pretty much the same boat but I can see a case to be made for keeping some analog FM radio broadcasts. The 6MHz per channel for TV is insane.)
> this spectrum should simply be reassigned for IP based services, with perhaps some set aside for non profit / educational uses, some for commercial, etc.
We've got internet, but no cable. So we still watch over-the-air TV, though it's mostly PBS at this point (which is non profit). Also listen to FM radio - mostly NPR, a jazz station and a classical station - all also non-profit.
We have everything and still use antennas for local broadcast: NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, Fox. Sports, especially football, are very easy to access over the air.
> It’s difficult to find official numbers, but under 1% of US households have no cable, satellite TV, home Internet, or a cell phone. The latter two are how people consume video and TV to a large degree today.
Fairly wrong/irrelevant metric. Lots of people subscribe to Netflix and watch OTA broadcasts.
Lots of people stick to a Plex membership just because of its DVR capability - that's for broadcast TV.
Lots of DVR and adjacent products out there on the market for people who watch broadcast TV.
I wouldn't dream of getting a cable subscription when I can get so much good content for free. Streaming fills the rest.
> Broadcast TV seems laughably irrelevant. It’s difficult to find official numbers, but under 1% of US households have no cable,
It's not that people are literally watching these on over the air digital TV antenna systems, but that if you have a "Broadcast TV" station in a certain market, it becomes carried by default on cable systems, direct to home satellite satellite dish systems, and regional FTTH providers' last-mile cable-tv-equivalent products.
Look at for example how all the Seattle TV stations are carried on Comcast or Astound's networks.
Irrelevant? I was under the impression cord cutting is pretty common. If you want to watch live sports or the news, you need CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX. We use a MoHu antenna in the attic.
I heard in some European countries they packed digital SD channels into less spectrum (one 6 MHz channel can carry 4-5 TV channels). We should have done that here instead of broadcasting HD.
If you plug in an antenna and scan for local channels, what used to be one analog TV channel on colloquially-named "channel 7" in the defined channel 7 frequency range will now be seen as "channel 7-1" which is often (but not always!) actually broadcast on the old frequency. During the ATSC transition, it was important to retain the branding and consumer memory of "channel 7" even when the RF transport frequency changed.
The transition opened the ability to have an arbitrary number of digital subchannels, 7-2, 7-3, etc etc. The total bitrate available on a given ATSC broadcast is fixed, but it can be partitioned among multiple MPEG streams. The typical setup is one (occasional two) HD channels and several SD channels. Obviously there's a balancing act between bitrate and visual quality for each subchannel. It's often used as a way to broadcast older (read: cheaper) syndicated SD content on which they can run more ads while keeping the main HD channel quality reasonably acceptable.
Atsc 3.0 does this in a lot of areas, it is in my area, all the channels are multiplexed from one broadcast, although it's hard to tell on the tv since you get the virtual channel numbers that are different and the same as the atsc 1.0 channels
Seventeen years ago, when we transitioned, the state of available and deployed equipment, codecs, and home receivers would not have permitted it.
I mean sure, you could pack four streams into one 6MHz channel. They could even be "HD" insofar as the transmitted stream is 720p or 1080i.
The result would have been MPEG-2 program streams of about 4.5Mbit each instead of about 18-19Mbit (assuming no other subchannels). That would make live sports or anything with significant motion look like absolute dogshit.
You might say that you don't care about that, and that is fine for you. However, in that case, I would respectfully submit that opinion to be far from the center of the bell curve of television-viewing American public of that era.
We could do a lot better with ATSC 3.0. So, there might someday be a second round of broadcast frequency reclamation, just as there was with ATSC 1.0.
The original transition (and release of extra frequencies) was a delicate and painful process with lots of involved parties who had to spend lots of money to make it happen. Politically speaking, it could only happen if everyone involved saw some actual benefit from the change.
If you got into a time machine and tried your plan two decades ago, the conversations would have gone something like this:
-----
Government: "Hey broadcaster, we need you to throw out and upgrade all your broadcast equipment that's working just fine today."
Broadcaster: "Why?"
Government: "So we can auction off some of the broadcast channel bandwidth."
Broadcaster: "Why else?"
Government: "That's really it."
Broadcaster: "How about instead, I take a little bit of that money you're asking me to spend, and give it to your political opponent's campaign?"
-----
Government: "Hey citizens, we need you to buy a new TV or buy an adapter for your current TV that's currently working just fine."
Citizen: "Why?"
Government: "So we can auction off some of the broadcast channel bandwidth."
Citizen: "Why else?"
Government: "That's really it."
Citizen: "How about instead, I vote for the opposition candidate who says he'll let me keep my TV and my money?"
-----
We're able to juggle broadcast frequencies more easily after the transition. Not only did we shrink the broadcast frequency range at the time of transition, we did it again about ten years ago with far less pain.
Here in the US I get PBS on Channel 10 - there's 10.1 (straight PBS), 10.2 (PBS-World) and 10.3 (PBS kids) - do each of these take a separate 6MHz bandwidth, or are they packed into that single 6MHz bandwidth like in Europe?
Why shouldn't they get 6 MHz? My PBS station broadcasts 4 subchannels: the main PBS channel, PBS Kids, a channel with programming about our local region (which airs live coverage of our state legislature when it's in session), and a loop of weather information with audio from the local NOAA Weather Radio broadcast. Those are all useful public services. PBS Kids in particular I think has a very good reason to exist, considering the absolute wasteland that is young children's media on streaming.
They replace it for delivery. That's not what this is about. The change discussed here is about content creation. That content is already delivered through multiple channels.
This isn't about content delivery, it is about content creation. The rule change allows further centralization of editorial control of what your local reporters broadcast across all mediums.
Funny how this has diverged in Canada/USA which otherwise have broadly similar broadcast markets in many respects. The broadcast stations have been gutted of sports content in favour of a couple of specialty channels which are a combined $70/month for streaming/app subscriptions.
This analysis doesn't pass the sniff test. The presence of cable, satellite, or internet access says nothing about broadcast TV viewership. This is ownership of the content creation of local stations, not just the broadcast towers. Those stations have a presence on social media and streaming services.
Brendan Carr will need to go to prison too, I suppose. There’s nothing in the universe of an argument for why he should be allowed to overturn the will of Congress here, he’s just a petty criminal who doesn’t think he has to follow the rules. 2029 is gonna be a tough year.
In the early 2000’s analog public TV broadcasts were turned off in the Netherlands. The only way to receive the publicly funded channels was through a commercial company requiring a subscription to a digital service. I learned a lot that time.
I haven't watched broadcast TV in over a decade, except for live sports. I also haven't listened to broadcast radio in even longer. My teenage children don't know how to use the TV or radio. It's like someone telling me a company has a monopoly on the telephone lines; nostalgic for me but utterly useless in 2026.
And you believe everyone is just like you? What are the consequences of consolidating ownership of broadcast stations? Remember the Kimmel incident? How does that go with even more consolidation?
This will be remembered in history as a major test of whether we turn from a Republic to an Empire. If the executive can successfully override Congressional law, it's no longer a democracy.
In an ideal world we would roll back to the 1996 telecommunications laws. (or something approximating a sensible approach to less narrow share of the broadcast spectrum)
I think anybody with a gripe about "mainstream media" should really examine who owns most of the media (billionaires) and see the value in enforcing that more indepedent voices are heard, not less as the past three decades has been a relentless march towards.
The whole idea with the advent of the internet was that there would be so many more ways to be heard. That's been kinda true, but the public airwaves are dominated by corporate voices.
From what I've read, its blatantly illegal. So probably will be undone by the courts in a few months. I wonder if anyone has a list of illegal things this white house has mandated that were overturned and rebuked by the courts soon after.
Note that Tom Delay of all people (remember that guy? I'm old and I'd say barely) wrote an opposing op ed saying that even though he supports the change that this is contrary to the governing statute that he helped write, which explicitly bars the FCC from changing this limit
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/can-trump-fcc-re...
Crime is legal (if you're in the right group).
Didn't the supreme court recently overturn the Chevron Doctrine?
Doesn't that mean agencies like this are not free to set their own rules when a law is ambiguous?
And isnt the cap on number of households reached actually codified unambiguously in federal law?
Seems to me like this should not be allowed to happen.
Let me know if I am wrong.
If this Baltimore Sun article is accurate, it's worse than that as it sounds like the FCC is overriding a law passed by Congress and not just (re)setting a rule.
> The 39% cap was established by Congress in 2004.
1. https://www.baltimoresun.com/2026/08/06/federal-communicatio...
And what is this Congress going to do about it? Nothing.
The law isn't ambiguous.
Well, you see, under the current administration, everything is allowed.
> Doesn't that mean agencies like this are not free to set their own rules when a law is ambiguous?
Agencies can say whatever they want but courts are not required to defer to them when this inevitably goes to a lawsuit.
> In a 2-1 vote, the FCC repealed a 22-year-old rule holding that a company cannot own stations that reach more than a combined 39% of the U.S. television audience.
This seems like a very odd rule. What about things like CNN? Aren't they available to 100% of households?
The FCC mainly regulates broadcast. CNN is cable. Also, there's a difference between a station being in more than 39% of households and being 39% of the total market. Other stations still compete with CNN.
This is about over-the-air/broadcast stations (e.g., ABC/NBC/CBS affiliates), not cable stations like CNN.
Broadcast TV seems laughably irrelevant. It’s difficult to find official numbers, but under 1% of US households have no cable, satellite TV, home Internet, or a cell phone. The latter two are how people consume video and TV to a large degree today.
In exchange, we have a great deal of spectrum tied up for terrestrial TV, much of which goes to running infomercials or else is surreptitiously leased for terrestrial data broadcasts. And the government gets to decide to regulate it so it becomes inherently politicised - like favouring certain owners.
Realistically - this spectrum should simply be reassigned for IP based services, with perhaps some set aside for non profit / educational uses, some for commercial, etc.
(Radio is pretty much the same boat but I can see a case to be made for keeping some analog FM radio broadcasts. The 6MHz per channel for TV is insane.)
> this spectrum should simply be reassigned for IP based services, with perhaps some set aside for non profit / educational uses, some for commercial, etc.
We've got internet, but no cable. So we still watch over-the-air TV, though it's mostly PBS at this point (which is non profit). Also listen to FM radio - mostly NPR, a jazz station and a classical station - all also non-profit.
We have everything and still use antennas for local broadcast: NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, Fox. Sports, especially football, are very easy to access over the air.
> It’s difficult to find official numbers, but under 1% of US households have no cable, satellite TV, home Internet, or a cell phone. The latter two are how people consume video and TV to a large degree today.
Fairly wrong/irrelevant metric. Lots of people subscribe to Netflix and watch OTA broadcasts.
Lots of people stick to a Plex membership just because of its DVR capability - that's for broadcast TV.
Lots of DVR and adjacent products out there on the market for people who watch broadcast TV.
I wouldn't dream of getting a cable subscription when I can get so much good content for free. Streaming fills the rest.
> Broadcast TV seems laughably irrelevant. It’s difficult to find official numbers, but under 1% of US households have no cable,
It's not that people are literally watching these on over the air digital TV antenna systems, but that if you have a "Broadcast TV" station in a certain market, it becomes carried by default on cable systems, direct to home satellite satellite dish systems, and regional FTTH providers' last-mile cable-tv-equivalent products.
Look at for example how all the Seattle TV stations are carried on Comcast or Astound's networks.
Amusingly, there are streaming sites you can't watch without permission from your "television provider".
Irrelevant? I was under the impression cord cutting is pretty common. If you want to watch live sports or the news, you need CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX. We use a MoHu antenna in the attic.
I heard in some European countries they packed digital SD channels into less spectrum (one 6 MHz channel can carry 4-5 TV channels). We should have done that here instead of broadcasting HD.
That's already widely done in the US.
If you plug in an antenna and scan for local channels, what used to be one analog TV channel on colloquially-named "channel 7" in the defined channel 7 frequency range will now be seen as "channel 7-1" which is often (but not always!) actually broadcast on the old frequency. During the ATSC transition, it was important to retain the branding and consumer memory of "channel 7" even when the RF transport frequency changed.
The transition opened the ability to have an arbitrary number of digital subchannels, 7-2, 7-3, etc etc. The total bitrate available on a given ATSC broadcast is fixed, but it can be partitioned among multiple MPEG streams. The typical setup is one (occasional two) HD channels and several SD channels. Obviously there's a balancing act between bitrate and visual quality for each subchannel. It's often used as a way to broadcast older (read: cheaper) syndicated SD content on which they can run more ads while keeping the main HD channel quality reasonably acceptable.
That's not what I'm talking about though. We should have repacked ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox onto a single channel.
Atsc 3.0 does this in a lot of areas, it is in my area, all the channels are multiplexed from one broadcast, although it's hard to tell on the tv since you get the virtual channel numbers that are different and the same as the atsc 1.0 channels
Seventeen years ago, when we transitioned, the state of available and deployed equipment, codecs, and home receivers would not have permitted it.
I mean sure, you could pack four streams into one 6MHz channel. They could even be "HD" insofar as the transmitted stream is 720p or 1080i.
The result would have been MPEG-2 program streams of about 4.5Mbit each instead of about 18-19Mbit (assuming no other subchannels). That would make live sports or anything with significant motion look like absolute dogshit.
You might say that you don't care about that, and that is fine for you. However, in that case, I would respectfully submit that opinion to be far from the center of the bell curve of television-viewing American public of that era.
We could do a lot better with ATSC 3.0. So, there might someday be a second round of broadcast frequency reclamation, just as there was with ATSC 1.0.
If you limit it to 480i I think 4.5 Mbps would be fine. If you use a cherrypicker sports could burst to a higher bitrate.
The original transition (and release of extra frequencies) was a delicate and painful process with lots of involved parties who had to spend lots of money to make it happen. Politically speaking, it could only happen if everyone involved saw some actual benefit from the change.
If you got into a time machine and tried your plan two decades ago, the conversations would have gone something like this:
-----
Government: "Hey broadcaster, we need you to throw out and upgrade all your broadcast equipment that's working just fine today."
Broadcaster: "Why?"
Government: "So we can auction off some of the broadcast channel bandwidth."
Broadcaster: "Why else?"
Government: "That's really it."
Broadcaster: "How about instead, I take a little bit of that money you're asking me to spend, and give it to your political opponent's campaign?"
-----
Government: "Hey citizens, we need you to buy a new TV or buy an adapter for your current TV that's currently working just fine."
Citizen: "Why?"
Government: "So we can auction off some of the broadcast channel bandwidth."
Citizen: "Why else?"
Government: "That's really it."
Citizen: "How about instead, I vote for the opposition candidate who says he'll let me keep my TV and my money?"
-----
We're able to juggle broadcast frequencies more easily after the transition. Not only did we shrink the broadcast frequency range at the time of transition, we did it again about ten years ago with far less pain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_States_wireless_sp...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_wireless_sp...
TL;DR: 480i would have been an absolute non-starter.
Here in the US I get PBS on Channel 10 - there's 10.1 (straight PBS), 10.2 (PBS-World) and 10.3 (PBS kids) - do each of these take a separate 6MHz bandwidth, or are they packed into that single 6MHz bandwidth like in Europe?
Yeah, that's one channel. IMO it's wasteful to give PBS an entire 6 MHz.
Why shouldn't they get 6 MHz? My PBS station broadcasts 4 subchannels: the main PBS channel, PBS Kids, a channel with programming about our local region (which airs live coverage of our state legislature when it's in session), and a loop of weather information with audio from the local NOAA Weather Radio broadcast. Those are all useful public services. PBS Kids in particular I think has a very good reason to exist, considering the absolute wasteland that is young children's media on streaming.
ESPN, however, demands that they get the full 6 MHz.
Broadcast TV seems laughably irrelevant.
The people who watch it vote in numbers far out of proportion to their peers. Nobody would bother to capture the industry if it weren't worthwhile.
> but under 1% of US households have no cable, satellite TV, home Internet, or a cell phone.
Why are you bundling all those things together? The only thing we care about here is cable or satellite TV for your argument.
Those are all the things that replace broadcast TV
They replace it for delivery. That's not what this is about. The change discussed here is about content creation. That content is already delivered through multiple channels.
Well, cell phones and home Internet theoretically also replace cable and satellite TV but that’s not really what you see in real life.
My 70 year old grandpa just cancelled his satellite TV in favor of streaming :)
Because someone with access to those things has no need for rabbit ears.
Broadcast TV today is a stream of bytes. The same stream can be delivered via cable, satellite, a cell phone, or home Internet.
This isn't about content delivery, it is about content creation. The rule change allows further centralization of editorial control of what your local reporters broadcast across all mediums.
Except for live sports, for which it is still vastly superior - no subscription required.
Funny how this has diverged in Canada/USA which otherwise have broadly similar broadcast markets in many respects. The broadcast stations have been gutted of sports content in favour of a couple of specialty channels which are a combined $70/month for streaming/app subscriptions.
This analysis doesn't pass the sniff test. The presence of cable, satellite, or internet access says nothing about broadcast TV viewership. This is ownership of the content creation of local stations, not just the broadcast towers. Those stations have a presence on social media and streaming services.
Brendan Carr will need to go to prison too, I suppose. There’s nothing in the universe of an argument for why he should be allowed to overturn the will of Congress here, he’s just a petty criminal who doesn’t think he has to follow the rules. 2029 is gonna be a tough year.
In the early 2000’s analog public TV broadcasts were turned off in the Netherlands. The only way to receive the publicly funded channels was through a commercial company requiring a subscription to a digital service. I learned a lot that time.
What could possibly go wrong?
of course they do. Prepare for sinclair to own everything.
Nexsar is taking over Tegna. Currently tied up in courts, but it's pretty much sinclair-like propaganda machine.
I haven't watched broadcast TV in over a decade, except for live sports. I also haven't listened to broadcast radio in even longer. My teenage children don't know how to use the TV or radio. It's like someone telling me a company has a monopoly on the telephone lines; nostalgic for me but utterly useless in 2026.
most people aren't hn readers. broadcast tv is far from useless in 2026, that's how many normies watch tv.
this is all about allowing sinclair and their right wing ilk to own local news.
> this is all about allowing sinclair and their right wing ilk to own local news.
From 2017, "Sinclair Broadcast Group: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc
"John Oliver: Sinclair Broadcasting brings 'troubling' rightwing bias to local news":
* https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jul/03/john-ol...
"John Oliver: How Sinclair Broadcast Group 'Brainwashes' Local News":
* https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/john-ol...
And you believe everyone is just like you? What are the consequences of consolidating ownership of broadcast stations? Remember the Kimmel incident? How does that go with even more consolidation?
This will be remembered in history as a major test of whether we turn from a Republic to an Empire. If the executive can successfully override Congressional law, it's no longer a democracy.
Yet another thing to be undone when Trump leaves office.
In an ideal world we would roll back to the 1996 telecommunications laws. (or something approximating a sensible approach to less narrow share of the broadcast spectrum)
I think anybody with a gripe about "mainstream media" should really examine who owns most of the media (billionaires) and see the value in enforcing that more indepedent voices are heard, not less as the past three decades has been a relentless march towards.
The whole idea with the advent of the internet was that there would be so many more ways to be heard. That's been kinda true, but the public airwaves are dominated by corporate voices.
I'd like to think a democratic president would have the appetite to do that.
From what I've read, its blatantly illegal. So probably will be undone by the courts in a few months. I wonder if anyone has a list of illegal things this white house has mandated that were overturned and rebuked by the courts soon after.
Guess who is packing the courts right now?
It has its own wikipedia page, unsurprisingly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_affairs_of_the_second_Tr...
I wish more people would play the game Monopoly and realize how much it can suck to live in a world full of monopolies.