Federal Communications Commission scraps limit on broadcast TV ownership

ppseudolus about 3 hours ago 69 commentsRead Article on nbcnews.com

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magicalist•about 2 hours ago

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...

kurthr•about 1 hour ago

Crime is legal (if you're in the right group).

close04•9 minutes ago

Is anyone else wondering if this is just a “cover crime” for the ragebait while the real crime was s happening behind the scenes, not getting any attention because this news is capturing all of it? They’re doing something so ridiculously obvious that it’s illegal so they can’t possibly think this is where they gain something. The gain must be somewhere else.

hungryhobbit•29 minutes ago

There are plenty of things the Trump admin has done where that applies. This is (likely) not one of them.

This idiocy hasn't had its day in court yet, but (especially given how the courts have turned against the administration in most cases recently) it seems highly likely this will be found to be illegal.

ilovetux•about 2 hours ago

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.

disposition2•about 1 hour ago

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...

warkdarrior•33 minutes ago

And what is this Congress going to do about it? Nothing.

YeahThisIsMe•about 2 hours ago

Well, you see, under the current administration, everything is allowed.

curt15•about 2 hours ago

> 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.

ilovetux•30 minutes ago

Thanks. That actually makes it make more sense, chevron doctrine applied to courts and what they can/can't do.

Edit: made applies past tense

Finnucane•32 minutes ago

The law isn't ambiguous.

ilovetux•28 minutes ago

True, I tried to convey that.

jackb4040•20 minutes ago

The difference in this case is that the victims are the general public, who don't even own a single lobbyist and can be safely ignored.

trollbridge•about 3 hours ago

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.)

UncleOxidant•about 2 hours ago

> 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.

ericmay•about 2 hours ago

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.

walrus01•about 2 hours ago

> 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.

Animats•about 2 hours ago

Amusingly, there are streaming sites you can't watch without permission from your "television provider".

BeetleB•about 1 hour ago

> 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.

francisofascii•about 2 hours ago

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.

sophacles•25 minutes ago

You can watch all of these things on the internet (legally).

wmf•about 2 hours ago

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.

jyoung8607•about 2 hours ago

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.

wmf•about 2 hours ago

That's not what I'm talking about though. We should have repacked ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox onto a single channel.

UncleOxidant•about 2 hours ago

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?

wmf•about 2 hours ago

Yeah, that's one channel. IMO it's wasteful to give PBS an entire 6 MHz.

CamperBob2•about 2 hours ago

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.

dyauspitr•about 2 hours ago

> 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.

eigencoder•about 2 hours ago

Those are all the things that replace broadcast TV

mulmen•about 2 hours ago

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.

dyauspitr•about 2 hours ago

Well, cell phones and home Internet theoretically also replace cable and satellite TV but that’s not really what you see in real life.

trollbridge•about 2 hours ago

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.

mulmen•about 2 hours ago

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.

erickhill•about 2 hours ago

Except for live sports, for which it is still vastly superior - no subscription required.

Marsymars•about 1 hour ago

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.

mulmen•about 2 hours ago

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.

londons_explore•37 minutes ago

> 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?

SpicyLemonZest•26 minutes ago

Broadcast bandwidth is a limited resource, so it’s subject to special rules to ensure it’s fairly distributed in the public interest. It’s true that the rules aren’t nearly as important as they were when non-broadcast news was harder to find, although that doesn’t give the criminals in charge of the FCC a right to ignore the law.

Finnucane•33 minutes ago

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.

warkdarrior•34 minutes ago

This is about over-the-air/broadcast stations (e.g., ABC/NBC/CBS affiliates), not cable stations like CNN.

thenthenthen•about 2 hours ago

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.

SpicyLemonZest•40 minutes ago

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.

gcanyon•about 1 hour ago

What could possibly go wrong?

sleepybrett•about 2 hours ago

of course they do. Prepare for sinclair to own everything.

rdudek•about 1 hour ago

Nexsar is taking over Tegna. Currently tied up in courts, but it's pretty much sinclair-like propaganda machine.

freediddy•about 2 hours ago

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.

wombat-man•11 minutes ago

I love being able to watch sports for free with my antenna. I hope that doesn't end for a long time.

s0ss•about 2 hours ago

most people aren't hn readers. broadcast tv is far from useless in 2026, that's how many normies watch tv.

freediddy•14 minutes ago

TV viewership for 18-49 has dropped almost 80% since 2000, with the bulk of that drop between 2015 and today. So most "normies" are not watching tv. Older people might, but they represent a fraction of the spending audience.

sleepybrett•about 2 hours ago

this is all about allowing sinclair and their right wing ilk to own local news.

throw0101d•about 1 hour ago

> 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...

mulmen•about 2 hours ago

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?

freediddy•13 minutes ago

Yes most are just like me, because TV viewership has dropped almost 80% since 2000 for 18-49.

0xbadcafebee•about 1 hour ago

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.

lenerdenator•about 3 hours ago

Yet another thing to be undone when Trump leaves office.

altcognito•about 3 hours ago

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.

sophacles•22 minutes ago

The term of "mainstream media" is just a dogwhistle for old people and indoctrinated conspiracy theorists at this point. I mean one of the biggest users of it is Fox News (the biggest news channel by a lot).

At this point its just as meaningless of a term as "liberal" and "socialist". It describes nothing other than a disagreement with the far right position.

BigTTYGothGF•about 2 hours ago

I'd like to think a democratic president would have the appetite to do that.

mmmpetrichor•about 3 hours ago

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.

java-man•about 3 hours ago

Guess who is packing the courts right now?

krapp•about 3 hours ago

It has its own wikipedia page, unsurprisingly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_affairs_of_the_second_Tr...

jimkleiber•about 2 hours ago

I wish more people would play the game Monopoly and realize how much it can suck to live in a world full of monopolies.