• Broadcasting & Cable, Monday, January 8, 2007 11:15 AM

Sinclair Broadcast Group may yank 30 stations off of Comcast due to an ongoing battle over retransmission consent--and that would leave 3 million customers without their broadcast signal.

Sinclair's carriage deal with Comcast is up Feb. 5, and it is demanding cash from the cable operator to carry its stations in 23 markets. But Comcast is refusing to pony up and says Sinclair is the only broadcaster with which it can't cut a deal. But many of its stations can't go black at that point; a federal law says no in-market station can be pulled from cable during a sweeps period.

By insisting on cash, Sinclair has become the latest broadcaster to assert its legal right to demand money in exchange for allowing the cable operator to retransmit a signal. Last month, Northwest Broadcasting Corp. pulled Fox stations on Time Warner Cable in three states.

So far, stations have accepted ad time from the big cable operators and have only gotten cash from satellite and smaller cable oufits. But Kagan Research projects that stations stand to collect $225 million in retransmission fees this year from cable and satellite operators and telcos--a number that will balloon to $1 billion in 2009 when many station owners' cable deals, notably CBS, come due.

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