Another Pissing Match...

If you go to a Tegna station’s website, you will likely see a message about how the station has been blacked out on the Dish Network.

Here’s a screenshot of the top of the page at Tegna’s WTSP in Tampa.

A link points to a Tegna run website that is asking viewers to post mean messages to Dish Network on their social media.

The two sides are once again in a pissing match over retransmission fees.

Stations have seen their advertising dollars coming in shrink, and they are trying to fill that gap by getting more people to pay a higher fee to their cable or satellite company.

The problem is that while Tegna is doing this, so is Nexstar, Sinclair, Gray, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and others.

This means that all the media groups are trying to take a bigger slice from the same pie.

This is causing cable bills to rise into the hundreds of dollars and in reaction, more and more people are deciding to cut the cord.

Continuing to try and gouge the viewer is not going to end well, but it is not stopping companies like Tegna to try and do just that.

TV media groups are very short-sighted and are not looking to the future of what they can do to offset the loss of ad dollars.

Their websites are often just bloated cookie-cutter sites that are not worth stopping by.

There are few people in TV looking to innovate and are just relying on retransmission.

In the end, Tegna and Dish will come to an agreement, in which the details are never made public and the viewers will see their bill increase.

It’s really not rocket science for local stations to grow their digital and on-air product, but no one seems to want to do that and just continue to rely on past practices that will ultimately lead to their demise.

The newspaper industry made the same mistake and TV ownership groups apparently didn’t learn a thing.