October 1999
"Priming The Pump": The Role of Retransmission Consent in the Transition To Digital Television
By Stuart N. Brotman

IV. IGITAL RETRANSMISSION CONSENT AGREEMENTS

Broadcast stations seeking retransmission consent have the incentive to negotiate for digital carriage. Thus, during the past year, a number of major retransmission consent agreements for carriage of digital broadcast television have been made and announced publicly. As a result of these agreements, many cable subscribers will be able to watch the digital signal of at least one broadcast station.

Moreover, given the framework nature of these agreements, it seems very likely that further agreements should be forthcoming in the near future. The CBS, Fox and NBC owned-and-operated stations in the Time Warner Cable and AT&T Broadband and Internet Services (BIS) agreements have the capability of being extended to affiliates of these networks, which was the case in two rounds of prior analog retransmission consent agreements. These new digital agreements can thus be viewed as broader templates, which is consistent with past practice in retransmission consent negotiations. As detailed below, they are likely to cover at least 29.8 million cable subscribers, which represents over 44 percent of total U.S. cable subscribers today (See Appendix: Chart 2).