The president of the National Association of Broadcasters sent a letter to FCC asking it to stay out of coming retransmission fee disputes. In other words, the NAB doesn’t want the government to interfere when one of its stations holds cable or satellite viewers hostage for a better contract.

Now it’s normal for the NAB to want as much leverage as it can manage so its members can get as much money as they can get. That’s the capitalist way. What galls me is that the letter said the member stations want their negotiations to “remain free and market-based.”

When it comes to any given cable system, there is no “market” for broadcast programming. If a local system wants to show NBC, it can’t shop around to see which broadcaster will sell it at the best price. Its choices are to pay whatever the local NBC affiliate demands or to cause mutually assured damage by dropping NBC. The trouble with the second choice is that it hurts a lot of local NBC viewers as well as the station and the cable system.

For the public good, the government ought to get the cable and satellite systems to sit down with the broadcasters and hash out one equitable retransmission fee formula to be applied to the entire country. Such a formula would probably include an over-the-air channel’s percentage of viewers and the system’s number of subscribers. When a channel’s ratings go up or down, the cable or satellite system would adjust its payments higher or lower. If a channel’s ratings stayed below a certain threshold, it would receive no cash but would stay in the channel lineup, as with must-carry stations now.

The parties could revisit the formula every few years, and that would be it. We’d never see another local station go off a cable system over a retransmission dispute. The broadcasters would receive a truly fair, negotiated fee. But it’ll never happen unless and until the government folks (you know, we the people) insist.

This week, a unique delivery platform pulled out of the US market. Sezmi launched in Spring 2010 in Los Angeles, and it provided pretty standard TV fare in an unusual way. Sezmi subscribers used a special DVR to record normal over-the-air programming, pay-per-view movies (if they were hooked to the internet), and some cable networks. The difference was that Sezmi delivered those cable networks through an encrypted OTA signal that the special DVR unscrambled.

Taking a piece of OTA TV spectrum and using it for a pay-TV service is like putting a fence around some park land and charging visitors to get in. The presumption is that it’s a really bad thing for consumers. Sezmi wasn’t providing content that Los Angeles viewers couldn’t get from their cable or satellite TV providers; Sezmi was just doing it cheaper. And it’s easy to do cheaper when you piggyback on a public resource. That’s why I never liked Sezmi.

To be fair, Sezmi dropped the cable channel package less than a year later. It shifted its business model to be more of a standard OTA DVR plus internet-delivered movies. Which is what a Windows computer with Media Center will do for you for free, or what TiVo will do for you (beautifully) for a higher price. Whatever niche was left wasn’t enough, so Sezmi pulled the plug, shifting its focus to reselling its technologies to other providers.

Sure, Sezmi had stopped using OTA spectrum for pay-TV channels, but if I had given it any thought, I would have worried that Sezmi might start using it again if its national rollout of OTA DVRs had ever reached critical mass. So please forgive me for the shadenfreude, but I’m glad to see Sezmi leave town.