3 ms·

You managed to get this totally wrong. Broadcast television is taxpayer-subsidized, because broadcasters are given free use of the airwaves.

• tptacek 12y ago
  Your point is mostly orthogonal to mine, so your comment would have been better without the first sentence. But there's an interesting thing to consider on this tangent: television station owners do not necessarily own the content they broadcast, but might instead license it from production companies and distributors. The terms of those licenses include time/space restrictions --- television stations probably cannot themselves simply stream all their broadcast content over the Internet, because it isn't theirs to give away.