NAB’s LeGeyt makes the case that broadcaster scale is about survival, not consolidation
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Curtis LeGeyt arrived at the 2026 NAB Show with a message he has been delivering in Washington for months: the technology to sustain local broadcasting exists, but the regulatory framework is preventing broadcasters from fully using it.
LeGeyt, president and chief executive of the National Association of Broadcasters, said the show floor reflects a broadcast industry genuinely engaged with new tools, artificial intelligence for pre- and post-production, distribution platforms that extend beyond the linear signal, content formats built for mobile and social audiences.
What it cannot yet fully reflect, he said, is what broadcasters would do with those tools if ownership rules, spectrum obligations and sports rights policy were brought in line with the current competitive environment.
“We are competing for audience with streaming services that are very deep-pocketed and can compete for programming rights,” LeGeyt said in an interview with NCS. “We’re competing for advertising dollars with Google and Facebook. We’ve got to get those things modernized.”
Ownership rules and what scale actually means
LeGeyt said the NAB continues to press the FCC to update both the national television ownership cap and the remaining local ownership rules, arguing that regulations written for an earlier media landscape are now limiting broadcasters’ ability to invest in the platforms and people they need to remain competitive.
He was, however, deliberate about what the NAB is and is not asking for.
The push for deregulation, he said, is not a prescription for any particular business model, not a mandate for consolidation, and not an argument that every broadcaster needs a national footprint.
“They’re all trying to find the secret sauce with different business strategies. What we’re saying in Washington is let’s lift these prescriptions that don’t even allow for that experimentation,” said LeGeyt. “That doesn’t mean that tomorrow every broadcast group wants to have a nationwide footprint or wants to have necessarily more concentration locally. It’s a different strategy for each group.”
He also made the case for why consolidation in smaller markets serves local communities rather than undermining them. In many markets across the country, he said, the advertising base cannot support four independent newsrooms operating at a level that genuinely serves the public.
“I would much rather see a world in which, as a result of scale and synergies, we have one or two really robust news operations in a local market than four underperforming news operations,” he said. “Yet these FCC rules presume that markets one through five operate in the same way that market 200 operates. And that’s just not the reality.”
The messy middle of NextGen TV
On ATSC 3.0, LeGeyt described an industry caught between what the technology can do and what broadcasters are currently able to deliver.
NextGen TV signals are now available to approximately 75% of the U.S. population across roughly 80 markets. But most stations broadcasting in ATSC 3.0 are simultaneously required to maintain their legacy ATSC 1.0 signal, a simulcast obligation that consumes bandwidth and prevents broadcasters from fully deploying the capabilities the new standard enables.
“They’re bandwidth constrained,” LeGeyt said. “We see a world in which you’re using that linear distribution to, yes, distribute a better picture, a better sound — but really the hyper-local, the enhanced emergency services, your ability to really partner in different ways from a business perspective, all of that is going to lead to a healthier ecosystem.”
Resolving that constraint, he said, requires the FCC to move the ATSC 3.0 transition through what he called the messy part, the current period in which the infrastructure exists but the regulatory path to fully deploying it remains unresolved.
Sports rights and the broadcast ecosystem argument
LeGeyt said sports has become one of the most effective arguments NAB has made to policymakers in Washington, in part because it connects regulatory abstraction to a consumer frustration that lawmakers hear directly from constituents.
The core complaint, he said, is straightforward: following a favorite team across a full season now requires subscriptions to multiple streaming services on top of an existing cable or satellite bundle. The complexity and cost of that experience, he argued, is a problem the broadcast ecosystem is uniquely positioned to solve.
“Our view is that there are tremendous benefits that policymakers have really tapped into with their constituents when premier sports — whether it’s the NFL, the NBA, or others — are carried through the broadcast ecosystem,” he said.
He also pushed back on the idea that sports distribution is simply a question of who carries the game. Broadcast distribution, he argued, creates a local ecosystem around a team, from local advertising partners, newscast coverage and radio broadcasts, that a national streaming service cannot replicate.
“When you’re distributing your games through broadcast, it’s not just the three hours of the game,” he said. “Suddenly, you’ve got those local businesses partnered as advertisers. Stations are talking about those games on newscasts, local radio is talking about it. This is an ecosystem that uniquely serves the fan through broadcast — that when a nationalized streaming service sweeps in, yeah, they take three hours of the game, but they’re giving nothing else to attach that team to their community the way broadcast does.”
The FCC has opened a public inquiry into the sports marketplace and consumer access to live sports through broadcast with it seeing over 8,000 comments.
LeGeyt said NAB will continue to amplify the issue with policymakers and push for a clearer signal from sports leagues about their intentions with broadcast distribution.
Technology and the bandwidth to do more
LeGeyt said the tools on display at the 2026 NAB Show, such as AI-assisted production, real-time social and digital distribution and mobile-first content formats, represent a genuine opportunity for local broadcasters, but only if the people running newsrooms have the bandwidth to use them.
He framed AI and automation not primarily as cost-cutting mechanisms but as tools that free journalists to do more reporting rather than more production. The goal, he said, is a world in which the steady contraction of local newsrooms over the past decade begins to reverse.
“You’re reducing some infrastructural overhead, but you’re enabling yourself to pour more resources into those anchors, those journalists,” he said. “You’re setting up a construct where those newsrooms and your ability to provide that local programming can grow instead of the mode we’ve been in for the last several years, which is a bit of a steady decline.”
tags
Curtis LeGeyt, Deregulation, NAB, NAB Show 2026, NAB Show News
categories
Broadcast Business News, Heroes, NAB Show, Policy