No End in Sight for Retransmission Fee Increases, Projected to Reach $7.6 Billion

Don’t expect a slowdown in rising retransmission fees for local broadcast TV signals. US TV station owners can expect much more revenue from the practice in the coming years, according to the latest forecast from SNL Kagan.

Increases in per-month subscription fees and industry consolidation will fuel growth in TV station owners’ industry retransmission fees, which will rise from $3.3 billion this year to $7.6 billion in 2019, SNL Kagan predicts. Combined with other content fee hikes, retrans fees are helping fuel increases in subscription TV rates. Service providers are increasingly adding line items to subscriber bills to cover rising retransmission fees. Both AT&T and Comcast, among others, have now instituted “broadcast TV fee” line items on some subscriber bills. “The environment has improved for TV station owners,” said SNL Kagan. The market research company revised its previous year forecast of $6.05 billion in industry retrans fees for 2018 to $7.15 billion, highlighting that TV station owners “have increasingly obtained rates they believe are closer to the value they bring to multichannel video services.”