You might not have noticed that this time all the technical rules have changed. If you owned a teevee, it was danged-near guaranteed to be tuned into one o' those during primetime. But that was once upon a time. The big-three audience share's down to pretty near single digits, but it's still enough for the nets to threaten affiliates with direct cable or satellite distribution.
Stations are actually payin' networks for the right to be affiliated.
In 2000, it ain't so funny. Nah, the future they foresaw had nothin' to do with DTV, but it had satellite broadcastin', so the frequencies CBS said they needed just happened to be the same Ku downlink frequencies the DBS folks sought. Maybe they did manage to delay DBS a while. When they finally closed the inquiry 10 years later, advanced TV got transmuted to DTV, and DTV was mandatory so everyone would switch to it and balance the budget. I am not making this up.