Centralcasting - Drawbacks

Drawbacks

An over-reliance on automation (and a reduction in the number of people at the local station) may leave an individual station less able to respond to local breaking news, such as tornadoes or other natural disasters which require local, live and immediate coverage. Individual local stations must also retain enough equipment to handle Emergency Alert System messages, routing them automatically to any remote locations being used to encode the final broadcast signals.

The use of large amounts of centrally assembled programming may also reduce local diversity, turning a station into little more than a semi-satellite of a main broadcaster in another city. In some cases, individual stations in a group will legally need to maintain nominal main studios in or near their respective communities of license but will originate little or nothing from these facilities once most broadcast-related tasks become centralised.

Broadcast centralisation can create problems when one station in the group is sold (as the local master control functions which had been centralised must be restored before the local station is a viable stand-alone entity). There also needs to be some means to remain on-air locally if the link to the central hub is lost, lest a single point of failure take down all stations in the regional group.