Smith: Broadcasters Will Prove Critics Wrong
LAS VEGAS -- Touting recent policy victories, NAB CEO Gordon Smith told an NAB Show audience that the trade association “is back” and must continue fighting against efforts to encroach on TV spectrum and for policies that will help broadcasters flourish. Additionally, he said, the industry needs to, and through its NAB Labs initiative has begun to, invest in new technologies. “Our adversaries would like people to believe the best days of broadcasting are over. We will prove them wrong,” he said.
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Smith held up the fizzled Performance Rights Act push and the protections for broadcasters included in the recent incentive spectrum auction authorization as examples of the success the association has achieved by embracing “a new advocacy approach.” NAB has “demonstrated that through engaging the other side, we can change the course of legislation that threatens the public’s access to local radio and TV,” Smith said.
Opponents of the Stop Online Privacy Act took a page out of the NAB playbook as they stopped that bill, Smith said. “The technology community … used their medium, just as we did, to create a powerful megaphone to change forever how battles are won, or lost, inside the Beltway,” he said.
Now the NAB cannot let its guard down, Smith said. It will work to protect broadcasters’ interests as the FCC implements the spectrum auction legislation and will fight attempts to change the retransmission consent rules, he said. “The current broadcasting model can be undone by technology or by government or by some unintended consequence of both,” he said.
Additionally, through its Labs initiative, the NAB will work to push broadcasting on to new platforms such as mobile phones, he said. “We also need to be on tablets, laptops and game consoles and on mobile devices not yet developed,” Smith said. “NAB Labs will be at the forefront of this initiative to push the limits of broadcasting,” he said.