Government Regulation in Sport Broadcasting
During my sabbatical at the University of Arkansas in 2016, I sought to challenge the limits of my academic career. I wanted to write about topics which fascinated me, but about which I had no formal training or background. I endeavored to author 7,000-word solo manuscripts and publish in legal journals. To this day, I am still fascinated by what I uncovered regarding government regulation, or lack thereof, in sport broadcasting.
As live, unscripted sports programming becomes more valuable, issues around how those broadcasts reach consumers become more convoluted. I am convinced the pro-consumer thing for our government to do is designate certain sport broadcasts as public goods and pass anti-siphoning legislation which would prohibit networks from placing these events on pay television. But, in many ways, that ship sailed with the passage of the 1992 Cable Act that permits broadcast networks to collect retransmission fees from multi-video program distributors (MVPDs) in order to retransmit the networks' signal, given to them free by the U.S. government. In other words, consumers are paying for a signal they could receive free with an antenna.
As live, unscripted sports programming becomes more valuable, issues around how those broadcasts reach consumers become more convoluted. I am convinced the pro-consumer thing for our government to do is designate certain sport broadcasts as public goods and pass anti-siphoning legislation which would prohibit networks from placing these events on pay television. But, in many ways, that ship sailed with the passage of the 1992 Cable Act that permits broadcast networks to collect retransmission fees from multi-video program distributors (MVPDs) in order to retransmit the networks' signal, given to them free by the U.S. government. In other words, consumers are paying for a signal they could receive free with an antenna.
Chapter in ESPN and the Changing Sports Media Landscape (2019)
Marquette Sports Law Review (2016)
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Journal of Legal Aspects of Sport (2017)
Journal of Sport Media (2017)
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