On New Year’s day sometime in the early morning DirecTV stopped carrying our local NBC affiliate. As you would expect on the channel is a message that says they are sorry but the channel is not available. You go to the local channels website and they say to call DirecTV and demand that they put them back on. You call DirecTV and they say that they had no choice because the local station is demanding a lot more money in the new contract. I have never understood why the satellite and cable companies have to pay for stations that are free if you have an antenna? However I really don’t understand how they can keep asking them for more and more money when most of the programming doesn’t even come from them. More and more people are going to on demand or watching shows they like over the internet. Like its predecessor radio and newspapers they are on a steep decline in viewership, and making stupid decisions which cause us to change habits means it is unlikely that once this is resolved, that all of those viewers will return. Just like the other media’s I mentioned TV is making bad choices which will speed up their own death, which for me can’t come too soon.