If you pay a monthly fee to a television service (like cable or satellite), that company must get permission from your local stations to use their signals.

Pay-TV companies - like DIRECTV and DISH - make billions of dollars in profits each year, and sell numerous subscriptions because folks just want to see their basic television channels, like FOX, CBS, NBC, ABC and Univision.

Pay-TV companies must compensate local stations for using their signal - just like they compensate cable channels like Discovery, Food Network and The History Channel.

These greedy multibillion dollar companies would rather take your local channels off the air than compensate them and they are asking the federal government to get involved. The irony is, local channels are what viewers want the most.

Numerous pay-TV companies and local TV stations are able to reach agreements that keep viewers happy. But lately, some of the big companies have started playing politics with the process. In the last two years, more than four out of five times local channels were taken off the air, it involved AT&T or DISH - the same big companies begging for government intervention.

The good news is that viewers always have options - you can switch providers or buy an antenna and get your television for free with no monthly bill.