NAB Show New York: US broadcasters tackle challenges of a shifting landscape

NAB Show New York wrapped last week having attracted more than 12,000 attendees, around the same as 2023 and a couple thousand down on its pre-pandemic peak. The two-day event comes at a time when US broadcasters face serious pressures on their business model and an existential threat from a Trump presidency.

Were it not a presidential election year, US TV stations would be in even more pain. Political ad spending on TV stations is expected to reach $3.94bn, up 10% from the last presidential election year in 2020 boosting industry revenue, including gross national/local spot advertising, digital and retransmission fees 8.3% to over $40bn.

“We believe the industry will become increasingly reliant on political advertising revenue in even years,” said Rose Oberman, Media & Entertainment director, S&P Global Ratings. “At the same time, many local TV broadcasters face refinancing upcoming debt maturities at higher interest rates in 2026 and beyond. As a result, we expect EBITDA will gradually decline and cash flow will weaken.”

S&P Global Ratings have already downgraded several local TV broadcasters, including Cox Media Group, Gray Media, Sinclair and E.W. Scripps giving them negative outlooks.

This matters at a show like NAB which is owned by Gray, CMG, Sinclair, Scripps and 8,000 other members of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB). At its second event of the year, held on the East Coast, the lobby group continued to argue that its battle versus streamers like YouTube TV will be lost if the government doesn’t step in.

NAB is specifically calling on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate OTT programming distributors like-for-like with traditional pay TV distributors like Charter Communications and Comcast.

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The issue is important to station groups, which believe they can increase their retransmission consent revenue if they are able to negotiate directly with YouTube TV, Fubo, Hulu and other virtual multichannel video programming distributors (vMVPDs).

As reported by TV Technology, the discussion has divided the broadcast industry between station owners, who want the vMVPDs reclassified, and broadcast networks owned by major media companies, which want to continue to handle deals with online providers as part of much larger distribution pacts.

Currently, station groups handle retrans negotiations with traditional multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) like Charter Communications and Comcast. But broadcast networks and major programmers like The Walt Disney Co. and Paramount Global handle retrans deals with vMVPDs because the streaming services are not classified as traditional pay TV operators (or MVPDs) under FCC rules.

“It is impossible to understand the demands local stations face without coming to grips with the sea change wrought by streaming,” NAB Chief Legal Officer Rick Kaplan said in a recent letter to the FCC. “The Commission’s rules were designed for a different world, and if the agency is truly committed to ensuring local service to communities across the nation, then it must examine the interplay between local broadcasting, the dramatic rise of streaming and the unregulated big tech behemoths that have shattered the economics underpinning local journalism.”

The show also coincided with Hurricane Milton, the coverage of which on local TV illustrated its vital importance for serving communities, CBS Stations President Jennifer Mitchell said at the NAB New York conference.

“Local news is so incredibly important and remains important,” she said. “Local journalists know how to cover [Hurricane Milton] better than anyone else. That will not change. It’s just, how will we distribute that information? How will viewers consume that information? It’s important for us to be in all of those different places and serve the consumer.”

While Mitchell was at NAB NY, Donald Trump was demanding that CBS News have its broadcast licence revoked for editing an election special interview with Kamala Harris.

This is not being dismissed as posturing since should Trump win the White House and implement the right-wing manifesto Project 2025 it would force the FCC to censor all media companies and their licensed outlets for reporting negatively about the president.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel released a statement saying that these threats against free speech are serious and should not be ignored. Rosenworcel wrote: “The First Amendment is a cornerstone of our democracy. The FCC does not and will not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage.”

CTV scale

In the show conference, representatives of CBS News, NBCUniversal Local, and E.W. Scripps debated ‘Advanced Streaming and FAST Revenue Strategies for Local TV.’

There was optimism about the ability to leverage data with AI to deliver more targeted content and advertising. They also agreed that scale was needed to reach audiences on multiple platforms.

Tom Sly, VP, Strategy at Scripps, said: “We have some peers that are afraid to promote Connected TV, and they’re afraid to talk about it… but we have to wake up and say that business and the audiences are transitioning and we’ve got to change with them and we’ve got to move fast.”

In another session focussing just on Tubi, CEO Anjali Sud said the Fox-owned FAST service was exploring fan-driven content development as a unique area of user engagement and growth. “We just launched the first fan-fuelled studio in streaming which is designed to allow anyone to pitch an idea to be green-lit by Tubi and distributed on Tubi based on fan feedback. Fans are going to make the show. We’re working with Color Creative to help them succeed and we will learn about whether that’s a model that can work. I’m interested in what are the scalable and efficient ways to bring in unique stories from unique storytellers.”

The AV convergence

With the broadcast market static to shrinking, technology vendors are expanding their sales activities into adjacent sectors, notably from the corporate, government, higher education, and finance world. As IBC did this year, NAB is also making its exhibition more attractive to those buyers and said it had hosted executives from Bank of America, Best Buy, Dell, Ford, IBM, JP Morgan Chase, the U.S. Air Force, and U.S Military Academy among core audiences from ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, HBO and Univision.

“Technologies like virtual production and inexpensive cine-style cameras make content creation much more easily available to people who aren’t television broadcasters, but what’s driven a real acceleration in the convergence of broadcast with AV is the ability to extend delivery of content directly,” says Ciaran Doran, CEO of cloud broadcast vendor M2A Media.

“Brands have woken up to the fact that they have been building a one-to-one direct relationship with their customers and that the next step is to communicate by live video and build an even tighter engagement with them.”

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