tyrannical bastard

A new one....Comcast/Xfinity and Nexstar are about to come to blows.... https://tvanswerman.com/2022/12/10/comcast-could-lose-nexstar-owned-local-stations-in-carriage-row/

Could their minimum wage ($18 an hour) be causing some problems? That may be a high hurdle in places where the cost of living is dirt cheap. Then again, I know people in the industry who've been working 10-15 years and STILL don't make that much...

Marquee is only getting the channel 4 facility and will basically have to build it from the ground up. The former WTLW (now on WTLW-LD) and it's intellectual unit will be status quo, with their current mix of family, religious and secular programming under their existing ownership, https://www.limaohio.com/news/2022/11/17/wtlw-sells-one-of-its-two-frequencies/

Like the old Headline news was years ago, cable channels have become an endless jukebox of shows. It's silly to think what purpose they even serve as the shows they air on repeat over and over again are often readily available on demand from a streaming service without the on-screen clutter and commercials that pretty much put things on at oddball times (that's more of a TVLand thing though and TBS TurnerTime is long gone.) Since they're jukeboxes, they're pretty much turnkey operations that require little human intervention. And in the digital realm where channel space is unlimited, these channels won't go away anytime soon until everybody switches to streaming and the cable bundle dies once and for all.

Were the affiliates ever in question (even on satellite DirecTV?) On the OTT platform it could have been an issue given the brief Disney/ABC vs. YouTubeTV spat last year when even the ABC affiliates were pulled from YTTV.

I see Meridian is getting a new GRAY-Hound station

Tonight is Greg Peterson's final newscast at WPMI NBC 15 in Mobile. He is stepping aside to work at the restaurant he co-owns with his wife, and to concentrate on his involvement in a mortgage company he is a partner in. https://www.facebook.com/people/Greg-Peterson-NBC-15/100058084209224/?ref=py_c

It looks like they did have two full-powered (UHF) repeaters that converted to digital, but temporarily shut down due to budget cuts in 2013 and opted to auction those frequencies when the microwave link failed. One of the repeaters (WSBN) originally had the WSVN call letters (when the current WSVN was WCKT) and WBRA was initially WBRZ's planned call letters, but they opted with the latter because, well....

Was WBRA an auction participant who settled for a VHF-low alottment? Their current signal must be a disaster if they want to move up to VHF-high.

Here's the rest of the story. It was WCBI's Jon Sokoloff who tweeted (again!) about the Auburn job, and it was news to Lane Kiffin as well. Hence the tweet mentioned above.

In response to Lane Kiffin being rumored to take the Auburn head coaching job he tweeted this...and this was WLOX anchor Hugh Keeton's response... In contrary to the rumors, Lane just re-upped his tenure as coach at Ole Miss... The funny part is, Ole Miss is in the Memphis market (Oxford) where Starkville is the home of rival Mississippi State! And WCBI is actually based in Columbus, MS...part of the Columbus-Starkville-Tupelo market. WCBI is on cable in Oxford, though.

Absoultely 100% true! I remember him back in the 80s on WEWS. Here's a clip from 1986. https://youtu.be/bFhNusRpFMQ?t=735

WDAM's prior set had a major upgrade a few years back with the video wall, not even WLOX got that upgrade. Both sets were introduced about the time they both went HD.

Now if Nexstar wasnt in BILLIONS of dollars in debt, they should have held out and leased the land to Bally for them to build the casino on, but as we saw with the CBS negotiations earlier this year where WJMN was stripped, Uncle Perry isn't a very good poker player...

I wonder if they have their sights set on taking an affiliation away or two from Block and their total monopoly on the Lima market.

Attached is a current picture of the existing set from Meterologist Deitra McKenzie's facebook profile: Basically, it looks like the original set that Benedek put in (like WTVY also used to have before they switched to the standard-issue Gil Jimenez Gray set) with some refacing. I remember when they went HD about a decade ago, they had the big studio-like cameras (which were actually hand-me-downs from WNDU...probably from their ND ownership days). As you can see, they are now the tiny PTZ ones that are commonplace with automation systems. At least they're not hanging from the ceiling! Given the cost of such upgrades, it makes sense for a station in a place like Meridian to space these out. Viewers aren't going to notice the automation (if it works like it's supposed to!) so that can be hidden in another year. And with Gray's graphic package rollouts, we all know how that is.

Paging Nexstar....time to get into the 2020s..... https://www.ftvlive.com/sqsp-test/2022/11/8/does-your-station-have-a-streaming-channel

The graphics remain the same, though. Upon first inspection, I thought it was a variant of the Nexstar ABC package, but this look pre-dates that (going back to LIN-MG) and has lots of similarities...

More of a hackjob than a ripoff. Basically using another package and trying to localilze it, with bad results. WTRF used this package too. I'd post the video from YouTube, but it appears to have been taken down. Their opens looked good but they had one that was clearly "keyed over" like these.

Even if NBC (and ABC) drop 10pm programming and compete with Fox stations with newscasts, there's still plenty of dayparts where Fox can counter the networks with local news. Most notably, 7-9 am when Today and Good Morning America are on. NBC ties up 9-11am with even more Today and ABC stations are locked in at 11am with The View. CBS may be the first to drop morning news if they finally give up on the 7-9am hour after decades of failure. And WWL would have the last laugh!

I believe Spectrum does have both in Muskingum, I don't know if WHIZ blacks out the duplicate content on WCMH though. For all intents and purposes, WTTE itself can likely remain, because it is no longer affiliated with FOX 28, because of the end-around Sinclair pulled to put "FOX 28" on WSYX 6.3, and directly under Sinclair's control instead of longtime shell partner Cunningham, who now runs WTTE themselves as a repository of sub channels with little involvement of Sinclair. FOX is pretty quick about pulling duplicate affiliations in many other markets, especially when a local affiliate signs on for the first time. This means that viewers in Muskingum County will get the new WHIZ affiliate, while all the other surrounding counties in the Columbus DMA will still get WSYX 6.3...aka "FOX 28" WHIZ (NBC) has a lot of cable coverage in the surrounding counties, but the new FOX arrangement likely won't transfer, unless they start local news casts and/or black out the FOX content outside of Muskingum County. Muskingum County will still get WSYX 6.1 "ABC 6", which means they'll still have the same newscasts they got on Fox 28, since Sinclair uses the same news department to make news for both stations.

Realistically, WTTE (and WSYX) were the only stations capable of serving Zanesville as a FOX affiliate in the absence of a local one. Given their unofficial status, they still showed up in the ratings since they were the only viable option. Now that WHIZ has the rights to FOX in Zanesville, expect "FOX 28" to go away on the pay TV side in Muskingum County and any residual viewership will be via antenna. Even east of Zanesville is still part of the Columbus DMA and Sinclair still has the rights there.

But Sinclair apparently had an official status with WTTE (and later WSYX 6.3) as the "de facto" Fox affiliate for the market. YouTube TV even carried them. It's only Muskingum County, so it shouldn't be too big a hit to FOX 28's ratings...

Regarding Columbus and NightBeat, at the time WBNS was getting their clock cleaned by WCMH at 10pm (and other time slots) so they decided to shake up the 11pm show. This was when NBC still owned WCMH (and now we can say when 10TV was owned by the Wolfes) ... never could we imagine that WSYX and WTTE would rule the ratings and 10TV sells out to Tegna... But back to the recycled news titles. Cleveland had two times of "Action News". WKYC used "Action 3 News" from the 1970s to 1985-ish (likely because Virgil Dominic left WKYC to move to Atlanta for a few years, only to resurface at WJ(K)W to make them more NBC-like with "NewsCenter8" ). Then came the WOIO variant we all know and love until the "Cleveland 19" disaster. Same can be said for "Eyewitness News" in Cleveland. KYW (in their Cleveland years) was one of, if not the first to use the title for their newscasts. Later, WEWS would pick it up and use it all the way until 1990. The one thing that surprised me was how short the "Good Day" brand lasted in Cleveland. It only lasted from 1994 to 1995, from when they went FOX to the "ei8ht is news" era. Even before Fox got a hold of the station. That move of desperation was probably the one thing that kept Fox from implementing it at the time, coupled with WJW's rise to perpetual dominance in the ratings....

In the 2000s, WBNS in Columbus also revamped their 11 pm news as NightBeat, using a totally different graphics package and harder cuts of This is Your News. I believe it lasted until they went HD in 2007 and shed the 10TV Eyewitness News branding and became 10TV News HD. Here's their 2003 debut. The subject of the lead story, a wanted fugitive showed up at the 10TV studios right at the top of the show to give her side of the story.