In June 2006, I started writing the Broadcast Law Blog, discussing issues like the broadcast ownership rules, music licensing issues, FCC filing windows for new broadcast stations, AM radio improvements, political broadcasting issues, and an upcoming technology transition for digital television. It is funny how these same issues, or ones very close to these issues, are still what we are writing about 20 years later. And they are keeping us busy so that, somehow, with all that is going on in the media world right now, and with a heavy June schedule of speaking at broadcaster’s conventions around the country, I missed noting the 20th anniversary of our first post on June 11, 2006.
20 years ago, we promised to try to give our take on the important news of the day for broadcasters – and noted that our comments would go beyond traditional broadcasting to cover other media issues saying:
Broadcasting is no longer an island unto itself. Instead, each day it becomes more and more clear that the world that traditional broadcasting inhabits is one that goes far beyond those narrow areas that the FCC has traditionally defined as a broadcast service. Thus, we will be pointing out developments and legal decisions that impact not only traditional over-the-air radio and television stations, but also those in the myriad “new media” that are now so crucial to any understanding of the broadcast industry. Media “convergence,” which has for so long been nothing more than a buzz word thrown around to make it seem like we’re thinking about the future, is finally here, and cannot be ignored in a discussion of the broadcast industry.
Nowadays in this blog, we routinely discuss streaming, podcasting, artificial intelligence and the many other ways that the public can today get news, entertainment, and other information. While the media world has radically changed over the past 20 years, we are still trying to convince regulators just how much change has occurred. Regulators often seem reluctant to acknowledge how much the media world has changed, and how broadcast regulation has not kept up with that change. Broadcasters, being subject to ownership rules that limit how much content they can provide in any market, and being subject to content regulation that does not apply to other marketplace participants, are hobbled in their ability to respond to today’s multichannel, on-demand world.
When we started this blog, neither Spotify nor Apple Music had yet launched in the United States, and Pandora was just a year old. Netflix did not start streaming video content until the year after this blog launched. YouTube had only begun the year before. Advertising was but a trickle on most internet sites that existed at the time. And, today, over 70% of local advertising dollars that once supported broadcast stations (and newspapers, remember them?) are captured by digital media, with most of that going to Google, Meta, and Amazon, with more and more digital advertising platforms arising every day. Broadcasting’s advertising and audience have been more than cut in half in the time we have written this Blog. Yet many of the same rules that we were arguing about in 2006 are still subjects we are arguing about today.
From the topics we have covered in recent months, it looks like there will be no shortage of issues in media law to write about for the foreseeable future – though finding the time to cover everything is the most difficult part of trying to keep this blog going. To try to catch more of the topics we don’t have time to feature, for the last several years we have been publishing our regular summaries of the prior week’s regulatory activity – usually published each Sunday (see our most recent update here). And, at the end of each month, we look ahead to the next month’s regulatory dates and deadlines (see our most recent monthly preview, here). So, hopefully, through these summaries and our feature articles, we continue to provide a service to the broadcast community.
It is a thrill when readers of this blog come up to me to introduce themselves at various broadcasting and media events around the country. Keep saying nice things, and hopefully we can keep this blog going for a while – I don’t expect that we will run out of topics to write about!