• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, 10 hours ago

Major sports programming moving to streaming platforms -- especially digital-first platforms with no partnerships or ownership with over-the-air TV stations -- have always been a concern for major TV station groups.

Now they have formalized this concern in comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission, as the FCC has opened up a review of live sports moving more to premium streamers and away from TV-networks/TV station based legacy media companies.

Think Netflix with the NFL Christmas Day Games, and Amazon Prime Video with “Thursday Night Football” and its brand new package of regular-season NBA games. Google’s YouTube has the big "NFL Sunday Ticket" package of out-of-market games.

This comes in addition to many other mid-tier sporting events at both those streaming services..

For TV stations, a potential loss of their TV network partners' sports deals -- in particular the NFL -- means losing access to high-value local TV station inventory.

The NFL has always emphasized that over-the-air games would be a key element of its media plan. In February, it said ‌more than 87% of its games are aired on free broadcast TV and that all games are aired on free broadcast television in markets of participating teams.

TV stations, like networks, do not price high-valued sports ad inventory in a vacuum or individually. Sports programming inventory is packaged with other lesser-priced advertising inventory, including local news programming.

In addition, the live and highly viewed, locally aired NFL football games or NBA basketball games give a major viewing boost to local news.

From all of this, the complaint by local TV station groups is that the lack of sports inventory could weaken the advertising business prospects of local TV news inventory -- which, in turn, could force some stations to cut back on their originally produced news programming.

Local TV news remains one of the more valuable assets to TV stations -- and still has not had any similar competition from other digital-first media platforms.

News flash: Over-the-air TV viewership is drifting lower and will only get worse without the support of other higher-priced advertising in sports programming.

This comes as the NFL is renegotiating many of its current deals with TV networks and streamers.

Can TV stations stop the league’s drive toward what could be another touchdown for digital-first media?