Wall Street to the TV Guys: Please Bail on Broadcast for Cable!

Is News Corp. really going to yank Fox off the airwaves in response to Aereo? Snap consensus judgment from the various corners of the TV Industrial Complex: No way. At least, not anytime soon.

It’s possible that over time, if broadcasters do think that Aereo or Aereo-like technology really threatens the fees they get from pay TV operators for their over-the-air programming, they’ll move more of it to cable networks. And, in fact, programmers have already started moving lots of high-profile sporting events from free TV to pay TV. Near-term, however, people seem to think that both practical and legal restrictions — for instance, deals that Fox and CBS have with the NFL for football broadcast rights — would prevent this from happening. More practically, there isn’t any reason to do so, since only a handful of people are actually using Aereo to get broadcast TV for free.

All that said, Wall Street seems to like the idea. Bernstein analyst Todd Juenger gamed out a scenario where all four broadcasters moved from over-the-air to pay networks, and concluded that it wouldn’t be a terrible idea, at least financially. By Juenger’s thinking, the lost “retransmission fees” and advertising dollars the broadcasters would lose from over-the-air programming would be replaced by even higher “affiliate fees” and advertising dollars they could get on cable.