The Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has sent a letter to the chief executives of Google and YouTube demanding to know why their pay TV provider, YouTube TV, does not carry a pair of family-friendly channels.
On Friday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said he “received complaints” that YouTube TV “is discriminating against faith-based programming,” and posted an image of a letter sent to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and YouTube CEO Neal Mohan questioning why the streaming pay TV service did not carry channels from Great American Media.
The broadcaster’s main channel, Great American Family, originally started as Great American Country and exchanged hands multiple times before being acquired in 2021 by its present-day owner. For much of its existence, it offered secular programming that targeted a broad audience; over the past few years, Great American Media has revamped its schedule to include a mixture of secular, family-friend programming with light, faith-based shows.
A secondary channel, called Great American Living, included lifestyle and knowledge programming before it was relaunched last year into Great American Faith & Living. The network now includes a mixture of scripted and reality-based shows that primarily involve faith-centric storylines or subjects.
It isn’t clear if Great American Media filed a formal complaint to the FCC in recent months, though other religious-oriented broadcasters have done so in the past.
The California-based owner of broadcast station KQSL (Channel 8) has filed numerous letters to the FCC over the last few years, complaining that YouTube TV, Fubo and others have declined to carry the channel on their systems, despite repeated requests to do so. The channel is primarily offered in the Northern San Francisco Bay Area on cable and satellite systems under “must-carry” rules enforced by the FCC, by which the channel is legally obligated to be offered to subscribers of those pay TV services in exchange for a waiver of seeking fees for retransmission of their signal.
Must-carry rules do not apply to streaming services like YouTube TV, and it isn’t clear if KQSL’s complaints reached Carr before he fired off his letter to Google and YouTube last week. But his letter warned that broadcasters that offer faith-based programming may have a discrimination case against Google and YouTube if it is proven that their refusal to carry certain channels on YouTube TV is due to actual or perceived religious bias.
Carr acknowledged that the FCC’s ability to regulate streaming pay TV services — including YouTube TV — is limited at the moment. But he urged the companies to provide answers to certain questions about how they effectuate carriage deals, and said those answers would help the agency figure out potential new regulations in the future.
“Understanding the nature of carriage policies in the virtual [multi-video programming distribution] sector can help inform the FCC’s approach to the broader set of regulatory issues that the FCC has been called on to address,” Carr said.
A spokesperson for YouTube said the company “welcome[s] the opportunity to brief the FCC on YouTube TV’s subscription service and the strategic business decisions we make based on factors like user demand, operational cost and financial terms, and to reiterate that we do not have any policies that prohibit religious content.” They did not specifically cite why the Great American Media channels were not offered, nor did they say if other religious-oriented channels were refused in the past.
Great American Media and YouTube do have at least one business relationship: The entertainment company maintains at least two ad-supported YouTube channels — one called Great American Family, the other called PureFlix — which have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. The Pure Flix channel offers a limited set of free, full-length movies, and the description below each film includes a link to the Pure Flix service, which costs $9 per month or $90 per year.
While YouTube TV does not carry Great American Family or Great American Faith & Living, the two channels are offered on other streaming cable TV alternatives, including Frndly TV, Philo, Hulu with Live TV, Fubo and DirecTV Stream.
YouTube TV carries a limited amount of family-friendly and faith-based programming from Hallmark Media, including its three channels Hallmark Channel, Hallmark Family and Hallmark Mystery.
