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Recent increases in retransmission consent fees are a...

Recent increases in retransmission consent fees are a sign of market success, and not a failure, said Fred Campbell, executive director of the Center for Boundless Innovation in Technology. The increase is the natural consequence of the increase in competition…

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among video service providers (VSPs), he said in a CBIT blog post (http://bit.ly/1eqos75). “As a result of increasing competition among VSPs, broadcasters are finally in a position to negotiate fairer prices for their content.” Now that there are competitive VSPs in most markets, “cable operators have something to lose from a blackout too -- their subscribers,” he said. The premium paid by VSPs for their own content reflects the economics of the video programming market, he said. Though VSP competition has increased, “there is still significantly greater concentration and market power in the video distribution market than in the video programming market,” Campbell said. “It should be no surprise that, as competition among VSPs has increased, the price of retransmission consent has increased with it."