The New York Times
Many of the country’s biggest television providers have signed on to a petition asking the government to revamp station retransmission rules. Cablevision, Charter, DirecTV, Dish Network, Time Warner Cable and Verizon all joined the coalition of providers and nonprofit groups in signing the petition on Tuesday.
But the nation’s biggest cable company, Comcast, was missing. Comcast finds itself in a peculiar position because it is buying a majority stake in NBC Universal, which owns the NBC broadcast network. “Comcast is conspicuously absent” from the calls for changes “because it expects to be a big beneficiary of retransmission consent before long,” Andrew Jay Schwartzman of the Media Access Project said in an e-mail message. More…