In some cases, broadcasters have operated groups of multiple stations at the regional or national level from one central facility, removing many tasks which were formerly done locally.
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.
[2] 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 were formerly required to maintain nominal main studios in or near their respective communities of license but originated little or nothing from these facilities once most broadcast-related tasks become centralized.
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.
[27] The resulting product contains largely the same content (and potentially the same journalistic biases) in each market in which it appears,[28] raising objections from proponents of localism and opponents of concentration of media ownership.