mre29

On 1/25/2024 at 9:53 PM, AmericanErrorist said:

They could take away new J!/WOF, Drew Barrymore, and the news magazines, but that's about it.

Oh, what would we do without our daily dose of 48 Hours?!?

7 hours ago, NowBergen said:

I look at KDNL in St. Louis, which supposedly ABC has not been happy about yet they keep agreeing to affiliation agreements with Sinclair in the end.  

 

The issue becomes how does a network drop an affiliate?  If there is a strong independent station, that can work or if they plan to start their own station as NBC did in Boston (which probably would not happen anymore, especially outside a top 10 market).  If there was a whole affiliation switch in a market, then some other network gets stuck on a Sinclair station, just maintaining the actual problem.

Prior to Nexstar buying a majority stake in the CW, I'd have said the easiest solution would be to take ABC for KPLR and send the CW to KDNL, but that's not likely now that Nexstar has a good reason to keep the CW affiliation. Maybe Weigel could be convinced to make room for it on KNLC or Scripps could take it for WRBU.

9 hours ago, GoldenShine9 said:

I think the only way that they would start selling is if they start losing network affiliations.

 

Most of their stations rank dead last in markets in news ratings.

Could the networks threaten to pull affiliation to get Sinclair to invest in their stations? Or require certain affiliates to be sold to new owners? I'm thinking of KDNL in particular.

4 hours ago, Rusty Muck said:

Absolutely no sane person, no person with a shred of mental competence, would willingly allow themselves to be made a target like David Smith has. This is worse than your typical delusions of grandeur that the likes of Elon Musk have.

Or a certain orange-skinned individual.

4 hours ago, Rusty Muck said:

This has a good chance of not just killing the Sun outright, but coupled with the $500M in legal fees from Diamond's bankruptcy case, could damn well be the death penalty for hundreds of television newsrooms across the country, if not a financial death penalty for David Smith and Sinclair as a whole.

This would be a very good time for Sinclair to sell some of their stations, and not just small ones, either. But something tells me the company's response to that would basically be, "If we can't control those stations, NO ONE CAN!"

17 hours ago, Rusty Muck said:

He's flying too close to the sun and will collapse under his own hubris. Just watch.

Or under the weight of the giant bird he's wrapped around his neck...

Leave it to Nexstar to lay off individual words.

On 1/6/2024 at 8:44 PM, MediaZone4K said:

HLN tied with HBO, I didn't think HLN had that many viewers.

I didn't think HBO had that few.

On 1/6/2024 at 8:44 PM, MediaZone4K said:

How much profit in commercials can TV networks realistically make with less than 500,000 viewers?

This is why I'm waiting for the inevitable mass-culling of cable channels. There are so many channels that aren't pulling their own weight and are still around only because they're bundled with their more popular siblings. At some point, one of the parent companies -- Disney, Comcast/NBCU, WBD, Paramount, etc. -- needs to say, "Yeah, this isn't working out anymore." and start winding channels down. But which company is going to blink first?

Anyone read this Variety article from last week?

Most-Watched Television Networks: Ranking 2023’s Winners and Losers

You can click through to read the entire article and see the full tables (one for total viewers, the other for the top 50 for adults 18-49), but for this board's purposes, I'll just note the following from t he total viewers table:
 

Quote

 

5. Fox News

8. MSNBC

22. CNN

51. Newsmax

69. HLN (tied with HBO)

71. CNBC

89. Newsnation

92. Fox Business Network

 

Are business news channels just not a thing anymore? Because CNBC was just barely beat out by a channel that should be in The Walking Dead.

Quote

HBO and its linear premium cable counterparts: The pay TV channels have been at the forefront of sending viewers to their streaming counterparts, and that has given them some of the biggest declines of any channels this year. That starts with HBO, down a tremendous 34% among viewers, with Showtime down 25% and Starz down 31%. Starz Encore and Cinemax weren’t even measured this year.

I'm guessing a lot of viewers were getting the Max (nee HBO Max) streaming service as part of their HBO subscription and realized the streamer was more valuable to them than the linear channels.

I'm also guessing it's the main channels that were tracked, not all of the digital multicast channels. Time to wind those down, I'd say.

With the Comics Unleashed reruns on CBS set to end later this month with the premiere of After Midnight, I have to think the owners and managers of some affiliates must be quietly relieved -- specifically, anyone who owns or runs a CBS affiliate in a market where Allen Media owns a competing station. Sure, the episodes are all over a decade old and yes, we're talking about the 12:30am ET time slot, but the show was hosted by the guy who now owns a station that directly competes with them. At the very least, it must have been a bit weird.

On 12/29/2023 at 5:50 PM, CoopInTheHouse said:

In addition, it discontinued streaming free as a FAST network online.

No wonder I couldn't find it in any of the FAST services I have on my iPad.

On 12/30/2023 at 9:15 PM, mrschimpf said:

I still don't understand how you only make a two-year deal and call it a 'multiyear' deal, especially when RTC deals are usually on a three-year cycle. The two-year cycle suggests either some acrimony from Comcast that they now prefer bi-yearly deals, and certainly panic on Paramount's side so they can keep the unseen lights on for a few of their zombie networks as long as possible.

Comcast should have pushed harder for some of those zombies to be dropped, especially the ones that only show music videos. We have YouTube for that.

But, then, someone at Comcast seems to think MusicChoice is worth keeping around, so...

2 hours ago, DENDude said:

WBBH has updated it's website (NBC-2.COM) to the Hearst web platform as of today & Hearst Managed--WZVN has followed suite (ABC-7.COM).

Both stations dropped the Franke Media powered websites, that had been in use since 2016.

 

Good to see. That said, I was hoping Hearst would take the opportunity to reveal a new site design, but I guess they're keeping the current look for now.

I could see Paramount merging with a pre-WBD Discovery, as the latter was basically just a bunch of cable channels at the time. But this.....

7 hours ago, tyrannical bastard said:

 

 

Standards and practices (if they even have one) will have their work cut out for them.  Expect Perry Sook's swear jar to be overflowing...

What the hell is an "all-name team" and do the athletes have a say in whether or not they're on it?

Sigh...

College football with college-level humor, because that's what sports coverage really needs. Enjoy, sports addicts fans.

5 hours ago, ABC 7 Denver said:

Cable is linear... Do you mean Broadcast vs Cable? You compare Linear to OTT. You compare FAST to SSS.

Linear includes both broadcast and cable. Also, how does FAST compare to a single-serving site?

On 12/7/2023 at 7:15 PM, ABC 7 Denver said:

Honestly, I won't be surprised and will laugh hysterically when this has consistently better ratings than News Nation.

Sooooooo..... day 2? 

On 12/6/2023 at 6:54 PM, hmaxhanson said:

...And I guess its also proof that Nexstar won't be changing CW's name after all.

I would think dropping three letters and a space from what was a six-character name qualifies as a name change.

On 12/6/2023 at 4:03 PM, T.L. Hughes said:

I’m not fully convinced it’ll be a fully cable/satellite-exclusive network. TBN’s various networks—Inspire, Smile, Enlace USA and Positiv—are available on its OTA stations (they are pay-TV-exclusive in markets where TBN doesn’t own or have an affiliation with an OTA station), so there’s a decent probability that Merit Street ends up getting a subchannel slot on its O&Os, either as a new subchannel or as a replacement for TBN Inspire or Positiv. Merit Street does plan to offer FAST channels, whether that includes the main network is the question.

My mistake. I really should have written "linear channel" instead of "cable channel".

On 11/26/2023 at 12:39 PM, Yankees4life said:

What a waste of space. As if the world needs MORE cable channels...and more cable channels to not watch and be forced to pay for...

The fact that it's launching as a cable channel says a lot about who the target audience is:  older people who are more likely to still have cable TV.

On 12/4/2023 at 4:47 PM, CircleSeven said:

The deal is now closed. Consummated on Friday (12/1).

Any word on the Montana stations?

On 11/29/2023 at 10:28 PM, MediaZone4K said:

Then again, the syndication options are dry. What could NBC have put there? They've been reduced to airing Dateline  on o&o stations.

Lifestyle shows? Home renovation shows? Travel shows? I'm sure NBCU has some of those available in its back catalog.

15 hours ago, T.L. Hughes said:

This got by. but Bloomberg reports that Byron Allen now wants to acquire some of Scripps’ stations (read: those in small and, possibly, some mid-sized markets).

The article's paywalled. Could you provide a link to non-paywalled coverage? Thanks.

On 11/16/2023 at 2:48 PM, T.L. Hughes said:

According to the Baltimore Sun, Smith was once arrested in August 1996, for “committing a perverted sex act in a company-owned Mercedes.” First time I’ve heard about this.

That happened in 1996? Assuming Smith was never arrested again, I would think it'd be a non-issue 27 years later.

1 hour ago, ColtFromGulfcoast said:

THAT RIGHT THERE. So, let's just say this was all without an affiliation agreement.  Well then, at any point, Nexstar themselves could have easily pulled the affiliation. But let's say that Nexstar and Adell had gotten into it after the CW began airing WWE and acquiring whatever other events and then Nexstar had pulled the affiliation and gave it to whoever.  

 

Adell would STILL be crying nonsense. This is the man that had a major network affiliation in 1994 all but handed to him on a gold (never mind silver) platter but managed to mess that up and sent them to a station no one knew existed and is just now relevant. Adell is what would have happened had Weigel been run by wackos and it's an insult to even mention Weigel in this post. 

So you're saying that he's so bad that people and companies we consider to be terrible owners would be better than him?

Ion and the CW airing live sports. Whodathunkit? What's next, candlepin bowling on MyNet?