Fans flood FCC with letters in support for RFD-TV; cable mergers could spell end of programming

RFD-TV's "All American Cowgirl Chicks"

Rural Americans want rural television. In response to proposed mergers between Comcast Cable and Time Warner Cable and AT&T U-Verse with DirecTV that could lead to RFD-TV being canceled in many markets, the Federal Communications Commission has been flooded with letters in support of rural programming, Thomas Gryta reports for The Wall Street Journal. More than 11,000 of the 25,000 filings about the Comcast deal and more than half of the 3,3000 comments on the At&T deal have been in support of Rural TV.

Carl Savely, a 60-year-old attorney from Sparks, Nev., who wrote a letter to the FCC, told Gryta, "Quite frankly, there are no other TV stations out there that carry the programming that RFD-TV carries. If the big city boys decide to drop them, as some of them have already done, that programming is gone."

Gyrta writes, "RFD-TV's viewers are widely distributed throughout the country, based on the location of the comment writers to the FCC." Patrick Gottsch, the founder of RFD-TV's owner, Rural Media Group, told him, "Not everyone lives in Manhattan. Everything can't be directed at 18- to 34-year-old urban audiences."

Last year Comcast dropped RFD-TV in Colorado and New Mexico and "many carriers, including Time Warner Cable and DirecTV, have been open about their push to shed channels with low ratings and low viewership to help reduce programming costs, at a time when channel owners have been raising carriage fees," Gryta writes. "Cable companies also are interested in using space in their pipes for more lucrative high-speed broadband services."

"In its pitch to gain lawmakers' support for the DirecTV acquisition, AT&T has pledged to expand broadband Internet coverage to at least 13 million rural U.S. households," Gryta writes. "But its U-verse television service doesn't offer RFD-TV to its 5.7 million subscribers. AT&T cites limited demand." (Read more)