Broadcast television, once the unquestioned center of American life, now stands at the edge of obsolescence. What was once a cultural hearth has been pushed to the margins by streaming, cord-cutting, “cord-nevers,” and the algorithmic dominance of Big Tech. Viewers have migrated, advertisers have followed, and revenue models that once sustained thousands of stations are eroding at an accelerating pace.
The uncomfortable truth is that fragmentation has become fatal. American broadcasters, still bound by ownership rules written for another era, are ill-equipped to compete against digital behemoths that operate without limits. Unless policymakers, regulators, and industry leaders embrace consolidation, the medium that has long been free, universal, and trusted risks being reduced to a relic of a bygone era.
Consolidation is not corporate opportunism. It is not greed masquerading as efficiency. It is, quite simply, the moat against extinction. Scale delivers what no scattered patchwork of small owners can: bargaining power with networks and distributors, capital for technological innovation, and the ability to invest in the digital platforms consumers now expect. Without scale, localism becomes a tombstone, not a virtue.
An Evolved Media Ecosystem
The facts are stark. Nielsen reports that as of May 2025, streaming accounted for 44.8% of U.S. television usage, surpassing the combined share of cable (24.1%) and broadcast (20.1%) for the first time.1 The trend is irreversible. Streaming usage has grown more than 70% since 2021, while cable and broadcast have declined sharply, and the number of “cord-nevers” continues to climb. Each year, millions of households still abandon cable – 5.1 million in 2024 alone – underscoring the structural shift.2
Advertisers always follow the audience. U.S. digital advertising revenues reached $258.6 billion in 2024, up nearly 15% year-over-year, dwarfing television’s $62 billion.3
Google, Meta, and Amazon command nearly two-thirds of that digital market, using precise algorithms to target consumers in ways fragmented broadcasters cannot.
Their dominance is not merely about reach, but about control of the data pipelines that determine what consumers see, when they see it, and the price advertisers pay to reach them. This is a level of market power no individual broadcaster, however resourceful, can match without scale.
Meanwhile, retransmission consent fees, once a lifeline, have plateaued at roughly $13 billion across the industry.4 Political ad revenues remain cyclical, and spot advertising has softened under pressure from recessionary fears and digital substitution. Local station profit margins, which a decade ago averaged in the mid-teens, now hover around 8%–10%. Station valuations reflect this reality. Where broadcast assets once traded at EBITDA multiples of 10x or higher, today they fetch 6x–7x.5
In short: The market economics of fragmentation no longer work.
An Outdated Regulatory Framework
Yet broadcasters remain shackled by ownership limits designed for a different era. The national audience cap, which is 39% of U.S. households, was set in the 1996 Telecommunications Act.6 That cap, modified by the “UHF discount” during the analog-to-digital transition7, is an artifact of a time when ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox commanded nearly all viewing, and local station ownership determined community influence.
But today, broadcasters no longer just compete against one another. They battle global streaming conglomerates with no ownership caps, no localism obligations, and no FCC regulatory oversight. The asymmetry is glaring and patently unfair. To hold broadcasters to 20th-century restrictions while their 21st-century rivals expand without constraint adds insult to injury. It is a slow and painful suffocation played out in real time, year by year.
The courts have already signaled readiness to modernize. In FCC v. Prometheus Radio Project (2021), the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the FCC’s decision to relax cross-ownership limits, noting that the Commission’s rationale of adapting to marketplace realities was reasonable.8 This precedent suggests that a new round of consolidation-friendly reforms would likely withstand judicial scrutiny. In effect, the Court affirmed that the public interest is not served by clinging to outdated ownership formulas, but by ensuring broadcasters have the flexibility to compete in the markets that actually exist. By contrast, to maintain strict caps in a streaming-dominated environment is to effectively legislate decline.
Scale as a Moat Against Extinction
In the words of the marketplace, size matters, and in broadcasting today, the bigger you are, the more you will matter.
First, there is bargaining leverage. Larger station groups like Nexstar and Sinclair can negotiate stronger retransmission fees, network compensation, and programming terms. Smaller owners, by contrast, are price takers. Scale alters the negotiating equilibrium, enabling large groups to secure favorable retransmission rates and program terms that smaller owners could never obtain on their own. This leverage not only improves revenue streams but also ensures that broadcasters can reinvest in content and technology, reinforcing their competitive position against digital platforms.
Scale produces efficiency and synergy. Consolidation reduces duplication across engineering, distribution, legal, sales, and production. A merger like Nexstar-TEGNA could generate $250–$300 million annually in savings9, representing capital that could be reinvested in digital transformation. In other words, every dollar saved on duplication is a dollar that can be poured into the fight for survival against Big Tech.
Scale increases the capacity for innovation. NextGen TV (ATSC 3.0), free ad-supported streaming television (FAST), unified mobile apps, and advanced ad-tech stacks all require heavy investment. Only scaled operators can afford them. Without consolidation, future innovative projects remain pilots or prototypes; with scale, they become industry standards that can be deployed across markets, creating measurable value for both advertisers and viewers.
What About Consumers?
Much of the debate centers around the impact on consumers. Critics argue that consolidation will erode localism, homogenize content, and diminish community voices. That risk exists. But it is likely that consumers gain far more. History shows that when industries consolidate, consumers often benefit from stronger infrastructure, broader access, and innovations that fragmented players could never deliver.
Larger broadcast groups can build and maintain resilient infrastructures for emergency alerts and disaster coverage, ensuring that local communities are not left vulnerable when disaster strikes. This capacity to deliver urgent, reliable information is one of broadcasting’s most enduring public obligations, and scale strengthens it. In an age of hurricanes, wildfires, and cyber outages, size isn’t just efficiency, it is the difference between staying on the air and going dark.
Consolidation also safeguards access equity. Broadcast television remains free-to-air, and only through scale can it remain viable in an era when streaming platforms depend on monthly subscriptions. For millions of Americans, particularly in rural and lower-income households, free broadcast access is not a luxury but a necessity. Scale ensures that this universal service can be maintained nationwide, bridging the digital divide for communities that would otherwise be left behind. Without consolidation, the promise of free TV risks becoming a relic, replaced by a paywall that millions of Americans simply cannot climb.
Viewers also benefit from higher quality and reliability. Bigger groups can invest in advanced transmission standards, high-definition upgrades, HDR, and robust streaming applications that make local stations more accessible across devices and markets. These are improvements that fragmented owners cannot achieve at the same level.
Advertising becomes more relevant as well. With unified ad-technology platforms, consolidated broadcasters can deliver fewer but more targeted commercials, reducing clutter while increasing relevance for consumers. Advertisers gain efficiency, and viewers are spared the fatigue of outdated mass-market ad loads. In short, bigger broadcasters can battle Big Tech on its own turf – giving viewers ads they actually notice, not noise they instinctively mute.
Consolidation underwrites sustainable journalism. Scale provides the financial backbone for investigative reporting and regional coverage that single-market stations often cannot afford. Rather than extinguishing local voices, consolidation makes it possible for them to endure, and regional journalism feasible, preventing outright collapse of local newsrooms. Without scale, watchdog journalism dies; with it, local voices not only survive but can be amplified.
Yes, a family-owned station may bring quirks and community familiarity. But without consolidation, many of those stations will simply vanish. Extinction, not homogenization, is the real threat.
Historical Precedents
Consolidation is not new. It is the natural progression of capital-intensive industries. In the early 20th century, there were more than 250 U.S. car manufacturers. Today, only a few remain. Consumers did not lose; they gained safer, cheaper, and better automobiles.10
Airlines tell a similar story: More than 20 carriers in the 1980s consolidated into the “Big Four,” which now serve the vast majority of routes. Banking too has seen thousands of consolidations, leaving fewer but more resilient institutions.
Television is no different. As of 2025, Nexstar owned or operated more than 200 stations reaching 116 markets, roughly 39% of households.11 Sinclair operates about 193 stations in more than 100 markets, reaching approximately 40% of households.12 The number of independent station groups producing local news has fallen by more than half over two decades.13 The trend is clear.
The only question is whether regulation will catch up. Unless the ownership rules evolve to reflect marketplace reality, consolidation will continue through piecemeal deals and workarounds rather than through coherent policy that strengthens the industry as a whole. In other words, the market has already voted for scale – it is Washington that needs to catch up.
And consolidation does not have to leave the “mom and pop” owners out in the cold. It is clear that shared services agreements (SSAs), joint sales agreements (JSAs), digital infrastructure partnerships, and other arrangements can benefit smaller entities in big ways. Local owners maintain branding and community presence while larger groups provide the capital, technology, and ad tech. In practice, it means hometown stations can keep their faces on air while the heavy lifting gets done by companies big enough to keep them alive. This is not exploitation; it is survival on new terms.
The Policy Imperative
For policymakers, the stakes are cultural as well as economic. Broadcast retains a relative edge in trust, especially for local news: Recent surveys show that 88% of Americans say they trust local TV news most among information sources.14 It remains free, universally available, and essential in emergencies. If consolidation allows broadcasters to continue performing this public duty in the face of digital disruption, it is not contrary to the public interest, it furthers it. Put plainly, keeping broadcasters small and weak does not protect the public interest, it abandons the public interest.
The decision is simple: allow legacy restrictions to hobble broadcasters into irrelevance, or adapt to marketplace reality and give them the tools to survive?
Conclusion
Consolidation of television ownership is not the death of competition. It is the condition for competition against Big Tech. It is not the end of localism. It is the only path to preserving local broadcasting at all. Policymakers, advertisers, and investors should embrace this reality. The alternative is not diversity and community. The alternative is decline and disappearance. Consolidation, therefore, becomes the marketplace moat against extinction. Broadcasting has always been a public trust as well as a private enterprise. To preserve it for another generation, America must let it grow even if that means fewer, but stronger, owners.
© 2025 Adonis Hoffman
Adonis Hoffman, Esq. is an independent counsel in Washington. He served in senior legal roles at the FCC and in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is a Trustee of The Media Institute and a member of its First Amendment Advisory Council. The views expressed are those of the author.
Endnotes
- Nielsen, The Gauge: May 2025, “Streaming Reaches Historic TV Milestone.” ↩︎
- Leichtman Research Group, Pay-TV Losses Accelerate in 2024, March 2025. ↩︎
- Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)/PwC, Internet Advertising Revenue Report 2024, April 2025. ↩︎
- Reuters, “$6 Billion Broadcast Tie-Up Adjusts M&A Picture,” Aug. 19, 2025. ↩︎
- AP News, “Nexstar Media Group Expands to Become Largest Broadcaster,” Aug. 2023. ↩︎
- Telecommunications Act of 1996, Pub. L. No. 104–104, 110 Stat. 56 (1996). ↩︎
- Federal Communications Commission, “UHF Discount Elimination Order and Reinstatement,” FCC 16-116 (2016) and FCC 17-40 (2017). ↩︎
- FCC v. Prometheus Radio Project, 592 U.S. 414 (2021). ↩︎
- Reuters, “$6 Billion Broadcast Tie-Up Adjusts M&A Picture,” Aug. 19, 2025. ↩︎
- U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, “History of the Automobile Industry.” ↩︎
- AP News, “Nexstar Media Group Expands to Become Largest Broadcaster,” Aug. 2023. ↩︎
- Wikipedia, “Sinclair Broadcast Group.” ↩︎
- National Association of Broadcasters, “Combined National TV Ownership Filing.” ↩︎
- GfK/NIQ for TVB, 2025 Local Broadcast News Survey (88% of respondents ranked local TV news as their No. 1 most trusted local information source). ↩︎