The U.S. Television Industry

Abstract

The U S television industry has often been labeled as being highly concentrated This article attempts to measure levels of seller, buyer, and "additional" concentration in the television station industry and then relates the findings to the Justice Department proposal to examine possible divestiture of the network owned and operated stations An oligopoly schema is used to test the hypothesis that, even when consideration is given to the three national networks in a measured value of concentration, the television industry is not a highly concentrated industry, i e , it would not be classified as a concentrated, type / oligopoly The measures support the conclusion that the television station industry does not have high seller and buyer concentration But, when consideration is given to an "additional" measure (the product representative function of the networks, i e , their networking functions involving program and advertisement sales), the industry was found to be highly concentrated The owned and operated stations, however, do not appear to enjoy a monopoly market situation, and based on this finding, it is suggested that the networks' divestiture of their owned and operated stations would do little to alleviate the problems of increased network revenues and program control