I’m at home today waiting for Dish Network installation, and I find out that our local CBS affiliate will no longer be carried on Dish, starting tomorrow. Apparently, they want more money from Dish for carrying their signal.

I’m going ahead with the installation, since one channel I watch a few hours a week isn’t a deal breaker. Honestly, I think small local stations are in danger of over-estimating their importance when services with hundreds of channels filled with competing content are available. For the few CBS shows I really want to see, I’ll probably just hit CBS.com, Veoh.com or BitTorrent. In fact, I’m watching the CBS crime drama Numbers on Veoh right now, waiting for the satellite guy to finish up.

Given that local affiliates are supported almost entirely by advertising, I would think they would want their broadcast seen in as many homes as possible. If anything, they should be paying to have their signal piped into around 40,000 homes on someone else’s hardware and infrastructure.

There’s probably a niche for local broadcasters, although plenty of them are really worried about the future. But granting them exclusivity to hold a major network’s signal hostage in a local market is bad business. The idea that I can get programming from all over the world via satellite, but I can only watch CBS programming after it’s routed (via satellite!) through a local affiliate is just silly. When local stations like KRCG go out of their way to call attention to this odd and outdated arrangement by demanding more money from people willing to distribute their advertising and content, they are shooting themselves in the foot. But then, that’s something KRCG has done a lot of lately.

One thing’s for sure — if I had just spent money on advertising with KRCG I would definitely be calling someone about a refund, since far fewer people will now be seeing that advertising.

UPDATE: Other local stations are pretty thrilled with KRCG’s bizarre decision:

“Any time you remove a television station from more than 40,000 subscribers or households, those viewers are going to go somewhere,” said Randy Wright, vice president and general manager of KMIZ/Channel 17. “We feel like it could potentially bring us some additional viewership to our four stations.”