The Digital Protestants
[SOURCE: Broadcasting&Cable, AUTHOR: John Eggerton]
Religious Voices in Broadcasting, a sort of splinter group of the National Religious Broadcasters, has sent a letter to the Senate Commerce Committee demanding that digital multicast must-carry be part of any upcoming digital TV legislation. The group, which includes TBN, the Christian Television Network and more than a dozen other stations and groups, says that their current carriage on cable systems is viable only thanks to the 1992 Must Carry Act, which mandated cable carriage of analog TV stations. Calling the digital conversion an unfunded mandate for expensive dual analog/digital carriage that has “disproportionately affected religious broadcasters,†the group says that mandated digital carriage of broadcast stations is the “fair and reasonable solution for maintaining a level playing field for small, independent and religious broadcasters in digital television.â€
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