Local television stations are platforms in a two-sided market connecting advertisers and viewers. This paper explicitly examines the effect that important intermediaries (such as cable, telephone, and satellite distributors) may have on a platform's pricing behavior in a two-sided market. I find that stations raise their fees to cable distributors because stations prefer that viewers access their content through satellite distributors with whom they do not compete in the local advertising market, and that station mergers lower stations' fees to distributors by partially internalizing a pricing externality that results from the mandatory bundling of local content.

In the context of sellers who sell their products through intermediary platforms, a platform most-favored-nation (PMFN) clause is a contractual restriction requiring that a particular seller will not sell at a lower price through a platform other than the one with which it has the PMFN agreement. Contractual restrictions observed in markets for e-books and travel services, among other settings, can be viewed as examples of this phenomenon. We show that PMFN clauses typically raise platform fees and retail prices and curtail entry or skew positioning decisions by potential entrants pursuing low-end business models.