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A duopoly (or twinstick, referring to "stick" as jargon for a radio tower) is a situation in television and radio broadcasting in which two or more stations in the same city or community share common ownership. ==United States== In the United States, the practice of duopolies has been frowned upon when using public airwaves, on the premise that it gives too much influence to one company. However, rules governing radio stations are less restrictive than those for television, allowing as many as six radio stations under common ownership in the largest U.S. media markets.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Mass_Media/News_Releases/1999/nrmm9019.html )〕 Ownership of television stations with overlapping coverage areas was normally not allowed in the United States prior to 2001, even those that were not duopolies under the present legal definition, by way of being located in separate albeit adjacent markets; this required broadcasters to apply for crossownership waivers in some cases to retain full-power stations based in adjacent markets.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Mass_Media/News_Releases/nrmm5081.txt )〕 Non-commercial educational broadcasters, mainly those that were members of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), were the only licensees allowed to sign-on or acquire a second television station that did not repeat the parent station's signal in the same market where they already owned a station (some of these acquired stations were originally licensed as commercial outlets). On August 5, 1999, the Federal Communications Commission voted 4-1 to allow common ownership of two television stations within a single market by one company, so long as eight unique station owners remain in the market once the duopoly is formed, and the four highest-rated stations (based on local monthly viewership reports for the market) remain under separate ownership.〔〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.carnegie.org/pdf/businessofnews2.pdf )〕 The FCC only requires the severance of an existing duopoly in which a once lower-rated station falls within the ratings criteria that prohibits such ownership over time if an ownership transaction is under review (such as a piecemeal or group sale of stations, or necessary license transfers during an ownership transaction involving the stations' existing owner); a company is required to sell one of the stations in the duopoly to another licensee if it is no longer compliant with one or both provisions. Once a duopoly is formed, the acquiring company takes over the operations of its new property. This secondary station is considered the "junior partner" in the duopoly, while the station that a broadcasting company had already owned prior to the duopoly's formation is considered the "senior partner". The operations of the two stations are usually consolidated into one facility, though not always that belonging to the senior partner, depending on the size and age of the facility chosen to house their operations. Since the stations involved in the duopoly are not restricted by FCC law from consolidating their operations, duplicative jobs at one of the stations are often terminated as the consolidation takes effect. News departments are also often consolidated into a singular operation, with anchoring and reporting staffs from the respective stations often being folded into one unit, subject to hiring determinations made by management; anchors and reporters are usually shared between the two stations, though in some cases, certain anchors may be employed to appear only on each station's own newscasts. In some cases (like with WHDH and WLVI in Boston, Massachusetts, when the former's owner Sunbeam Television formed a duopoly with WLVI after purchasing the station from Tribune Broadcasting in 2006), the junior partner's news department is shut down completely, with the senior partner subsequently taking over production of its news content using only their existing staff. In many cases, news programming on a junior partner is structured to avoid direct competition with a senior partner affiliate of either ABC, NBC or CBS (one notable exception involves WTTV and WXIN in Indianapolis, which carry competing morning and evening newscasts as Tribune Broadcasting opted to launch a separate slate of newscasts for WTTV when it became a CBS affiliate in January 2015, rather than shift those seen on sister Fox affiliate WXIN to the station; WXIN and WTTV largely maintain their own anchors, but share a news department and most reporting staff). This situation is uncommon in duopolies involving only Big Three affiliates, as stations affiliated with those networks are more inclined to carry newscasts in overlapping time periods in order to fulfill local programming requirements included in affiliation agreements. Certain syndicated programs are also shared between the stations, in the form of either same-day repeat airings of programs seen on the one which holds primary rights or separated runs of programs that air on each station, although each station maintains separate syndication inventories as well. The junior partner, unless it is affiliated with a major network, may also be used to carry network (and occasionally, first-run syndicated) programs that the senior partner is unable to broadcast because of long-form breaking news or severe weather coverage or a locally produced special airing in a scheduled program's normal timeslot, or in the case of certain non-prime time network programs, because the senior partner chooses not to carry it on its regular schedule to carry other scheduled programming. Although the FCC bars common ownership of any of the four major broadcast networks (ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox), it does not prohibit duopolies involving stations affiliated individually with any two of them, unless both are among the four highest-rated in the market at the time of a sale. As such, several Big Four duopolies exist based on certain market conditions that originally allowed them to be formed under the criteria (such as a company having acquired one of the major network stations as a low-rated affiliate of a smaller network prior to an affiliation switch or the ratings of a non-English station placing among the top four over a Big Four network affiliate). While most duopolies are made up of a senior partner that is affiliated with one of the four major networks and an affiliate of a minor network (such as The CW and MyNetworkTV) or an independent station as the junior partner, those in which both stations are major network affiliates typically involve a Fox station (which serves as the junior partner in all but a few instances) and an ABC, CBS or NBC affiliate, with some limited arrangements where two Big Three affiliates are jointly owned or managed. One of the few markets where two major network duopolies exist in some form is Jacksonville, Florida, where two companies once owned the licenses of the Big Four stations they respectively controlled. In 2000, the Gannett Company, owner of NBC affiliate WTLV, purchased ABC affiliate WJXX, which had struggled in the local ratings since its sign-on in February 1997 (when it took the ABC affiliation from WJKS through a group affiliation deal with the Allbritton Communications Company) due to its status as a relatively new station and issues with signal interference from PBS station WJCT on its Mediacom cable channel slot. The following year, Clear Channel Communications created a legal duopoly involving its existing Fox affiliate WAWS (now WFOX-TV) and WTEV-TV (now WJAX-TV), a UPN affiliate that it had been managing under a local marketing agreement since 1994; WTEV's viewership gradually rose after it became a CBS affiliate in July 2002, putting it in the top four threshold with WAWS, resulting in Newport Television – upon purchasing the Clear Channel television group in 2007 – restructuring the operation as a virtual duopoly by selling WTEV to shell licensee High Plains Broadcasting (WFOX and WJAX are now respectively owned by the Cox Media Group and Bayshore Television, LLC, but remain under common management though an LMA in which WJAX is the junior partner). The use of digital subchannels has been termed an "instant duopoly," because of the ease by which a single digital station can deliver multiple channels of programming from different networks at the same time. One station can carry four or more standard definition digital channels; multiple high definition feeds typically require too large a bitrate size to be carried on different subchannels of the same station simultaneously without loss of image quality. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Duopoly (broadcasting)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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