Re: a satellite question-- exclusivity?

[Shawn Mamros <mamros@MIT.EDU>]

>Tonight during the news of a tragic plane crash, CNN switched off to the
>CBC and began to carry them live.  A few minutes later, NBC came on with a
>bulletin and ran the same CBC feed.  I was wondering-- when I worked for
>ABC in the early 70s, we had an agreement that ONE station per market got
>our feeds.  Has that changed?  In other words, how can several stations
>from competing networks carry the same report or the same feed?  [...]

I think we're talking two different situations here.  In the latter
example, ABC provides a feed to one *station* - one affiliate - per
market.  You're not going to see channel 4 or 7 sending out ABC's
programming in Boston.

But in the former situation, it's one network providing a feed to
*other networks*.  There are no CBC affiliates in Boston. :-)  We're
also talking about two different media to some extent - cable (CNN) vs.
broadcast (NBC) networks.  If the CBC has agreements with both CNN and
NBC, that's their business.

And, when it comes to getting news footage of an event in Canada, are
there any other choices besides the CBC?  That may also be a factor in
such situations - if there's only one source for feeds or actualities in
a given location, all the US networks, cable and broadcast, that do news
are going to have the same footage.  Seems to be pretty common practice
on the nightly newscasts, actually...

- -Shawn Mamros
E-mail to: mamros@mit.edu

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