tyrannical bastard

By now, the changes have probably been made in all of the affected markets. I posted in the "Out and About" thread about Mobile losing their AM, noon and lifestyle programs on WPMI. So all that appears to be left is weekend newscasts and weekly 5, 6 and 10 shows. I know it's not KDNL, but this is a pretty bare-boned approach in a market the size of Mobile-Pensacola. But to Sinclair, it's probably a way to keep status quo on WEAR and their absolute dominance of the Florida side of the market.

This should probably go in the Sinclair thread, but it's pretty significant to mention here. This is the last day of WPMI's morning show, noon newscast and Gulf Coast Today lifestyle program. This Facebook post even hints at more "sharing" with cross-market WEAR in Pensacola. All the more reason Sinclair should have NEVER been able to run 4 stations in 1 market.

WUAB is now available on YouTube TV. I'll have to see if Gray has a universal deal with The CW or if it's just certain stations in certain markets.

Now, MLB is trying to force Bally to pay up for the Cleveland Guardians (Indians) and the Minnesota Twins. They skipped these payments, and if if they don'r pay up, they could seize the rights from Bally. https://theathletic.com/4385805/2023/04/05/mlb-diamond-sports-bankruptcy-twins-guardians/ Since they-re post bankruptcy filing, does this have any chance of actually happening?

Unlike Ed Ansin's sons taking over Sunbeam after his passing, Edith Waterman probably had no one in the family interested in continuing the family business, so selling was the only option. Had it been part of an estate sale, it would have driven up the taxes for any buyer.

I"m sure Hurricane Ian may have prompted them to sell. They fared much better than WINK, but the storm may have give them the realization that they need sister stations to step in when the next storm comes. And given the market, corporate ownership may be a good thing, dissolving the toxic cultures that have seemingly permeated the market for years. It is an end of an era for sure. What other market has been primarily comprised of locally-owned stations in this day and age?

There's still a couple of straggler CW stations that have yet to have been added to YTTV. These are the .2s on stations like WCBD, WNCT, WJTV/WHLT, etc....

Sinclair is reorganizing their businesses under a new holding company, Sinclair Inc. https://www.baltimoresun.com/business/bs-bz-sinclair-broadcast-changes-name-in-business-reorganization-20230403-r4qtoxhl7fctlkpynajgt3ncfi-story.html The Sinclair Broadcast Group will be a subsidiary, which will contain the moribund Diamond Sports venture, while another subsidiary, Sinclair Ventures will contain the rest of the company, including their investments, 3.0 development, Compulse Intergrated Marketing, and Tennis Channel. Seems like the stations are being set up for a potential sale. WHEN the Standard General / Tegna deal fails, will Soo Kim come knocking to take the stations off Sinclair's hands?

After years of having the same logo (as well as weather god James Spann), ABC 33/40 has decided to modify its logo. The new tagline is one that many are familiar with in Central Alabama...."Respect the Polygon!" And Happy April Fools' everyone!

My how the times have changed. Four years ago, the return of news on WWJ was an April fools joke....on this very site!

Andre Bernier used to have his "weather spies" when he was on in the mornings, but he slipped into "Dick Goddard" mode soon after Dick himself finally retired.

If they all want this deal to go through so badly, they need to pool all of their money together and buy out Apollo's share. Then again, to do that may be more than they can afford. It's a systemic problem when so much of broadcasting is tied up in these equity firms and mega-companies that "new" owners can't buy their way into these companies unless they don't have ties to foreign entities or have massive overlaps with existing broadcasters (with the Apollo/Cox conflicts). The only way may be to let these mega-companies fail and have the stations sold at auction to the highest bidder. The hope is that there are enough leftovers for new companies to enter the fold and have a chance at running a station when the license can be bought for a song. We're beginning to see the bubble burst with the Diamond/Sinclair fiasco, and it's having an effect on Sinclair itself with some of the recent cutbacks they've made. Nexstar may be next when the gouging of cable viewers catches up to them.

Looks like Nexstar's CW stations are now live on YouTube TV. This should include the MyNetwork stations and WGN. Time to "move" to Chicago! Or Marquette, MI to see what WJMN is up to.... EDIT:. Only the CW stations are available so far....

These stations are so stripped down, any buyer would have to literally build them from scratch to meet their needs. Then again, since so much of it is cloud and IT-based, that burden may be easier to bear. Remember the WAGT transition from Schurz to Gray? Media General held them to the SSA and even violated FCC rules for illegally taking back WAGT based on a lower court ruling that gave them the right to do so. Sinclair would probably hold any buyer to the same scrutiny if anyone else took a station they were providing services for from their "cold dead hands..."

Surprisingly, Mobile/Pensacola is one of the only Sinclair markets to have not moved LMA/SSA station feeds to their owned and operated stations. That could be with WPMI's NBC affiliation, and if it is contractually tied to WPMI, and cannot be moved to WFGX or WEAR as a primary or secondary subchannel, much like Sinclair has done in other markets like Columbus and Charleston. Meanwhile, stations like WALA continue to run away with expanding their local programming, and with the recent cancellations of Dr. Phil, Judge Mathis, and the People's Court, there goes the last of their daily syndication, clearing the way for Gray to put the KVVU model of news from sunrise to sunset. FTVLive picked up on a Twitter thread from a former employee, describing his experience working at WPMI, and how the belt tightening has been going on for a while now... https://www.ftvlive.com/sqsp-test/2023/3/26/sinclair-continues-to-cut

I guess time will tell how these stations will do until the affiliations are up. In a world where stations are adding newscasts left and right (with the decline of syndication and potential pullback by the networks in the coming years), a station like WPMI is doomed because of Sinclair's desire to "control" 4 stations in a market, and is limited by what they can put on their station (the 15% rule). What we could be seeing is the rise of NewsCentral 2.0. Didn't they already learn their lesson from this boondoggle 20 years ago? Instead of netlet and other weak affiliates getting a so-called local newscast, it's going to trickle down to a select group of Sinclair-run stations that can't cut it in their market. Now if they're really in deep trouble, it could trickle up to the larger stations as well.

And the hammer has dropped at WPMI in Mobile. https://www.lagniappemobile.com/news/deep-cuts-at-local-tv-station/article_52a2f324-ca89-11ed-accd-17afb130f97d.html (paywalled story) To sum it up, the 5-7 AM newscast, noon show and lifestyle program Gulf Coast Today will be cancelled. The National Desk will replace the 5-7 newscast with "local cut-ins" beginning on April 17th. The current 5, 6 and 10 newscasts, along with the 5 & 10 weekend newscasts will remain. Around 20 people were laid off. And yet, WEAR in Pensacola is seemingly unscathed, with no changes on the horizon. Sad, sad day in Mobile and for any Sinclair station that has gone through this, or is about to go through this. And as a sidenote, the Lagniappe (where the story came from) is now the only newspaper in Mobile (that still prints one). They have a reverse paywall where the print paper is FREE while the website costs $$$ to access.) The former "newspaper" AL.com ceased printing this past February, but they've been irrelevant since they Tegna-fied themselves a decade ago like most of the other Advance papers. The news void in Alabama continues to grow.....

And here we are when REPEATS of syndication are being kept on the air (Judge Judy) and prime time is reboots of old shows from the 80s and 90s. It makes the whole "season 9 was all a dream" that Dallas pulled off in the 80s with the death and return of Patrick Duffy that much more plausible these days.

So these are all the post-Roseanne episodes? Given her departure, those episodes will probably be permanently separated and likely unseen, unless someone like Fox Nation picks them up. In the past, shows with fractured histories like Valerie and The Hogan Family have always maintained their continuity as a series, but it looks like the producers are seeking to keep The Conners permanently separated from the reboot and continuation of the old series that spawned it.

This and other cutbacks could be ways to sell off other assets to raise some quick cash. The parts of these stations are likely more the whole package. Sinclair probably has them stripped so bare that no owner would buy them outright. In a place like Macon where Sinclair can't afford to keep the lights on yet Gray is buying a station could make for a quick sale of an affiliation contract or two. And if Sinclair's ties to Diamond being in bankruptcy can constitute an "out", then we could see ABC and/or FOX on WPGA again. When WGXA is no longer worth Sinclair's while, they sell off the license to any willing party. If it gets stripped of it's networks, it will be like one of the Howard Stirk stations running the low-rent diginets from a broom closet out of another Sinclair station, since the main studio rule is no more. Aside from Mobile/Pensacola, Charleston and West Palm Beach, this part of the country is a virtual no-mans land for Sinclair and their stations are spokes with little local content on them. What is "local", is piped in from another market. Macon supplied content to Albany, and when that came to an end, so did the local content. Now with Macon potentially losing the ability to produce local content, the void grows larger, and where will it come from?

In Macon, I wonder how much of their news they cut. WGXA has traditionally been the #2 station far behind WMAZ, I wonder if Morris' WMGT has surged ahead. And now with WPGA being traded to Gray, its practically a station set up to get its last laugh, if they succeed in luring away ABC and/or FOX from WGXA.

Cable and Satellite TV by design are obsolete unless they've converted to an IP-like delivery rather than the channels occupying spectrum space. But all of the exclusivity they enjoy (cable) is tied to local franchises and the infrastructure they built to serve their customers. That alone gives them the power to charge franchise fees to their customers. And they use their monopoly to charge to Infinity fees related to their service such as installation, equipment, and now retransmission fees on top of what it all costs. Sooner or later, they're going to have to get out of the "cable" TV business because in essence they're just using their local infrastructure to beam an IP service to their customers (unless they're actually delivering true cable TV which is probably as extinct as landline phones). I wonder what's stopping them from expanding behind their physical boundaries to become virtual MPDs within their DMAs. If that power was granted to them they could serve a lot more customers, so customers who are stuck with Mediacom as their only option could subscribe to Xfinity and vice versa, or pick one of the existing virtual providers. Customers with subscribe to their local service just for the bandwidth, and have the option of picking a television provider. Of course, cable companies with chime in by offering a "discount" to those who choose to subscribe to their own service, and charge a "penalty" or higher rate to a customer who picks the rival service on their home network.

FTVLive is getting reports that layoffs are going down at Sinclair stations....including WGXA and WACH. https://www.ftvlive.com/sqsp-test/2023/3/17/just-in-layoffs-going-down-at-sinclair-stations Earlier, all local newscasts were cancelled on sister station WFXL in Albany, so could this be the end of local news in both of these markets as well? Now that the Bally Sports joint venture has filed for bankruptcy, I wonder how much Sinclair is on the hook for....

I blame Nexstar for the rate hike on YTTV! (Well not really, it's a myriad of factors but likely due to inflation and CBS/Paramount and other companies wanting more money for their precious content.)