• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, July 2, 2013

Whipping up a mergers & acquisitions market for TV stations will ruffle some summer business rest and relaxation. Everyone will go to the mattresses. What isn’t known is whether acquirers will dream better as a result of those deals.

Sinclair Broadcast Group, with its 140 TV stations, has been making a number of deals lately. And this week, Tribune Co. agreed to buy Local Media LLC, bringing it a larger footprint across U.S. TV homes, with a total of 42 stations.

TV stations still benefit from the every-other-year revenue rise due to political and Olympic advertising, but continue to be bitten by distribution issues and a changing network financial structure. The problem, in a word: leverage.

With the networks, stations have much to consider, such as the threat by some networks to possibly morph into “cable” channels. Where would that leave ations? Unsure.

But we can be sure that the networks will continue to seek local promotion and ties to local advertising, all of which adds value on the national level. That promotion and advertising comes from local stations.

At the same time, networks take a good piece of the stations’ retransmission fees from carriage agreements with distributors. Stations no doubt would like to see that financial structure turn more their way. If they changed into ever bigger “super” TV groups, might that change?

Stations also continue to seek the holy grail of mobile – where local news content would be counted on to carry a major load of future advertising revenue, along with possible user fees. But that isn’t enough.

Meanwhile, cable operators might also be sensing that it’s time to get bigger.  At least, that’s the belief of one legendary cable executive, Liberty Media CEO  John Malone. He talked up the point that the cable industry needs more “scale,” pushing for a merger between the fourth largest cable system owner Charter Communications and the second largest Time Warner Cable. In a word, cable operators too are looking for leverage.

When you adding in ever-bigger content owners, things can get messy.

All of which means that future media negotiations between all these groups will distill into one word: conflict