DMAs. A Dinosaur From Another TV Era
by Jerry Gibbs

You don’t hear much about DMAs, or Designated Market Areas, anymore. With the advent of cable and satellite distribution over the past 25 years DMAs have largely been used by on-air broadcast professionals to highlight their career moves to the top markets in the country. You know what I mean….a reporter explains, “I was in market #214 in the town of Podunk and now I’ve jumped 83 markets to get here to the CITY of Podunk!”

We all know that New York City is the #1 TV market in the country. Here in the Boston area, those of us in the industry like to follow the numbers too. Each year we check to see if Boston is #6 or #7. Or could it leap to #5 or fall out of the top ten? It has huge implications for advertising rates, not to mention the pride of being in a "top market."

To the average viewer , however, DMAs might as well be an acronym for some type of scientific study, like DNA. It is a meaningless term which has no impact on their daily life. Until recently.

If you live in Bristol County, Massachusetts, DMA is a term that has been all over the news—in conversations at coffee shops, select board sessions, and town hall meetings. Why? Because for the first time Boston television stations have been taken off of cable and satellite systems—in the name of protecting DMAs.

As a member of a cable advisory board in a Bristol County town, the issue started fairly innocently in the fall of 2008. I started noticing that FOX 25’s network programming was being overlapped with the signal from the FOX affiliate in Providence. It seemed to be on a timer installed by Comcast, so the biggest issues were missing the first few minutes of the 10 p.m. Boston newscast and seeing promos for the Providence station while I thought I was watching FOX 25.

Soon enough that experiment ended and network programming on FOX 25 was blacked out entirely with a message board saying it was all due to an FCC regulation. I sensed that this was a DMA dispute and it could get worse.

HD channels were targeted next as we watched WBZ, WHDH and WLVI all leave the HD line-up in favor of the Providence affiliates. The reason for these changes was brutally simple…. Bristol County was part of the Providence “Designated Market Area.” To make matters worse, the FOX affiliate in Providence had enacted a little-used clause allowing them to black out competing stations in their market. FOX 25 was the initial target, but bandwidth issues for Comcast was now impacting the other Boston stations, at least on the HD line-up.

Soon phone calls and emails flooded into my board and other cable boards around the county. Some viewers were only 20 miles from Boston, but couldn’t receive their favorite Boston stations on their brand new HDTVs. What was up? I would explain DMAs to each person. It was like explaining how sausage is made—you just don’t want to know.

In researching DMAs I discovered some interesting things. Boston’s DMA, for one, includes counties in Vermont, hundreds of miles away from the city. I learned that DMAs were put together back in the 1940s when over-the-air antennas were in vogue and, other than a few small tweaks over the decades, that’s how the markets have been maintained.

Our congressional delegation asked Nielsen, the ratings company who controls DMAs, to answer questions about how they put markets together today. Nielsen told them that it is based on ratings for over-the-air antenna viewers TODAY. Even the most liberal estimate of viewers relying on over-the-air signals would likely be less than 5% of today’s TV viewing population. And you can just guess the average age of that group.

DMAs need to be based on reality. And the reality is virtually all TV viewing today is via a cable line or satellite signal to your home, not over-the-air. Once you look at that reality you’ll see the vast majority of Bristol County viewers identify themselves with Boston, not Providence. They want to watch Boston news and politics, not Rhode Island news and politics. And the ratings would prove that—if cable and satellite viewing was counted in the determination of DMAs.

Many communities in Bristol County, Massachusetts are being denied Boston TV stations because of this archaic, 1940s-era rule. In fact, if you are a satellite subscriber in Bristol County you don’t receive any Boston TV stations at all.

In another column I’ll talk about what steps can be taken to change these rules, but for now, let me hear your thoughts. Email me at savebostonchannels@gmail.com.