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Originally Posted by ScreamingViking
Thanks. I made a blanket statement without more than basic knowledge.
What is the funding like for small-medium size city U.S. stations? Do they get more local advertising money and other support than an average and similar Canadian station would? What about money from state or federal funding?
And I probably should not have said "local" -- CHCH didn't just provide coverage for Hamilton, or just its metro area... they covered news, sports, events, etc. in Niagara, Halton, and areas to the west as well. I think they were trying to maintain a regional presence, as they had in the past. Perhaps that was part of the problem, trying to do too much to keep filling the TV station void southwest of Toronto.
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I can't speak for the TV advertising market in the US, but in the US there are several policy factors that don't exist in Canada that have helped local TV:
1. The US allows "fee for carriage". This means that local stations can require cable companies like Comcast and Time Warner to pay to retransmit their signals. This has been a vital revenue stream for TV stations in the US, while in Canada it is illegal for TV stations to require cable/satellite companies to pay for their signals; the likes of Rogers, Bell, and Cogeco don't pay a dime to stations like CHCH to retransmit their signals to subscribers. All subscribers are paying for is the link between the station and their TV. (Note that specialty channels like TSN are treated differently since they don't broadcast free-to-air signals; they get revenue from both advertising and the cable companies.)
2. In the US, market exclusivity rules prevent cable/satellite subscribers from viewing out-of-market stations. For example if you live in Buffalo, your only NBC affiliate available is WGRZ. The cable company is not allowed to also carry the NBC affiliates in Chicago and Los Angeles, unlike in Canada where nowadays you can get almost every CTV, CBC, or Global station across the country. This means that CFTO as a CTV station in Toronto can lose viewers to CJOH Ottawa or CFCF Montreal because a viewer can't tell the difference between the CTV stations which have the same network schedules. The local ads on CFTO don't reach as many viewers as they potentially could in the Toronto/Hamilton market since some viewers are watching another CTV station instead and getting local Ottawa or Montreal ads. This, of course, is not directly relevant to CHCH since they are independent, but it speaks to the situation with local broadcasting across Canada.
3. The US government doesn't protect the industry the same way as Canada's CRTC. For Canadians this means less competition as incumbent broadcasters have special veto privileges against new market entrants. In the US, if I have a business plan and can get a spare frequency, and of course get a programming source, I can start my own TV station and there isn't a damn thing my competition can do, other than step up their game. In Canada, the barriers to entering the industry are massive. Remember when someone tried to start up a TV station in Niagara Region? It was blocked by CanWest, who threw a temper tantrum about not wanting more competition.