Syndication exclusivity (also known as syndex) is a federal law ( 47 U.S.C. § 76.103) implemented by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the United States that is designed to protect a local television station's rights to syndicated television programs by granting exclusive broadcast rights to the station for that program in their local market, usually defined by a station's Nielsen Designated Market Area. As a result, any airings of the same program on cable networks and, more commonly, superstations must be blocked by the local cable provider upon request from the local station. Broadcast television stations have the option of signing programming deals with or without syndex protection, but they stand to have audiences significantly diluted in markets without protection. Syndex protection is rarely enforced in regards to conventional cable networks, which (particularly since the late 1990s) often concurrently maintain rights to a particular program during the period of a broadcast syndication deal.
History The first syndex rule to be passed by the Federal Communications Commission went into effect on March 31, 1972. The regulations at the time were similar to those in the present-day law, except for the fact that they applied to almost all programming, including shows such as the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon. WTCG in Atlanta, the original "superstation" (which at the time was distributed only in the Southeastern United States, five years before it became available nationally via satellite transmission), had programming blacked out in some areas where duplication existed. In November 1976, the FCC began to consider making alterations to the syndex rulings. In April 1979, the FCC made a proposal to remove some of the rules. Further debate led the Cable Television Bureau of the FCC to recommend doing away with the rules entirely. On July 22, 1980, the Commission revoked the syndex rulings in a 4–3 vote, on the basis that "local stations are not adversely affected when a cable system offers subscribers signals from television stations in other cities." In 1980, the FCC lifted the old syndex law, as a way to bolster the growing cable television industry. This led cable systems to begin carrying other superstations and more regional out-of-market independent stations, at a time when the popularity of both was growing. The current syndex law was tied in part to the Satellite Home Viewer Act of 1988. In the run-up to that legislation's passage on May 18, 1988, Tom Meek (general manager of WOFL in Orlando, Florida), with the assistance of Preston Padden of the Association of Independent Television Stations (INTV), presented a study utilizing custom Nielsen audience data showing significant ratings dilution in the 7:00–8:00 p.m. period that was directly attributable to the carriage of identical programming via Chicago superstation WGN-TV on numerous local cable providers, resulting in an estimated loss in advertising revenue of several hundred thousand dollars. The legislation, H.R. 2848, had been blocked by Democratic representative Mike Synar, whose district included Tulsa, Oklahoma, where WGN's satellite carrier United Video Satellite Group was headquartered. After the study was presented to and subsequently validated by Synar's staff, Synar dropped his opposition under pressure from committee chairman Washington Democratic Rep. Al Swift. H.R. 2848, sponsored by Texas Democratic Rep. John Bryant, then passed. The syndex rules went back into effect on January 1, 1990. Before the reimposition of the syndex rules, stations like WGN and WTBS were paying local single market rates for programming acquisitions, even as they were gaining national coverage, and were selling that extended coverage to advertisers. After the syndex law was implemented, in at least some cases, the prices that superstations paid for program content had better reflected their actual national distribution, depending on arrangements with any given syndicator. Since 1993, syndex is currently being used to block superstations offered through a programming tier provided by satellite provider Dish Network from being picked up in certain markets. In this case, the CW and MyNetworkTV affiliates in given markets can invoke the syndex law to keep the superstations that have the same network affiliations as the local station from coming into the market in any form. CW stations are using the law in order to block KTLA in Los Angeles, WPIX/New York City and KWGN-TV/Denver, while WWOR-TV in Secaucus, New Jersey, since 2015, are presently blocked in markets where MyNetworkTV affiliates are invoking the law.
Legal challenges There have been a number of legal cases, most notably in Miami, and efforts in Washington, D.C. by terrestrial broadcasters to keep satellite providers from exploiting a provision in the law whereby satellite providers can offer programming where a broadcast station's signal is not available. In the Miami case, satellite providers were found to have allowed carriage of outside stations in households within a few miles of broadcast transmitters in violation of the law. Syndex is often unpopular with satellite subscribers and companies who would rather not afford local broadcast stations program rights protection.
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