channel2

21 hours ago, tyrannical bastard said:

Why not just ditch "Discovery" altogether?  Take a note from all of the failed combinations of the past....

 

 

Zaslav's ego probably wouldn't allow it.

21 hours ago, mrschimpf said:

Put the blame on John Huston...it's a quote from The Maltese Falcon.

 

As for this first logo...very deep Powerpoint/WordArt vibes. They'll fix it later in post.

It's supposed to evoke the classic Warner Bros. shield...

It's almost certainly a placeholder.

Not as grand though!

(cue Max Steiner fanfare)

Isn't Paramount half-dead anyway? Half their projects get shuttled off to streamers...

Also, wouldn't Warners have too many mouths to feed if they took on the Paramount/Republic/DW Studios library? Their own movie library is huge as it is...

So when's Jabberjaw gonna be on Shark Week?

And what if he didn't?

6 hours ago, tyrannical bastard said:

Another consequence of Nexstar's past digital mishaps, their unwieldy, hard to find, and god-awful website names they launched at many of their stations pre-Media General merger.   Even worse, in some cases they let the original, simple, call letter websites lapse so either they are now orphaned or have been swallowed up by cyber squatters.

 

And to add even more insult to injury in Green Bay, their website is still WeAreGreenBay.com. 

 

WFRVLocal5.com appears to be available, why not consolidate everything under the same name?

 

Oh wait it's Nexstar....nevermind....

Sometimes I forget that the average viewer doesn't memorize callsigns like we geeks do. Those horrible domains hadn't even occurred to me as a problem, so much as just stupid.

I believe it was The WB that gave Sinclair the sweetheart affiliation deal. The network, famously averse to compensation, agreed to fork over $64 million to Sinclair over a ten-year period in exchange for affiliations!

23 hours ago, mrschimpf said:

Seems like a contractual requirement of the LMA agreement or to fulfill some well-hidden public affairs remit as part of their license. It seems likely Spectrum also isn't happy to be carrying a Dabl station with main-channel two-digit carriage and asked them to air something local on that station.

They can't have a Dabl station on a plum channel number but ION can just keep on doing what they do...

Can't believe Weigel lost ground to themselves...

Somehow I hadn't heard about River Mile before now...

Surprised Kroenke's actually seeming to gain any traction with it! People seem to consider Elitch's this beloved institution, even though it's...really not great.

Also I have never set foot inside KCNC's building.

Do they need a new building?

I don't understand why there's such a hunger here to knock down facilities that are "old." NBC shows off 30 Rock like a prized heirloom, but everybody else's old digs? Gotta go!

47 minutes ago, C Block said:

How absurd. I’ve never been in that building, but I’ve always heard it’s pretty cramped inside. When you think about how much they’ve expanded with their national projects and KCDO, I’m sure it is getting to be pretty tight in there.

 

I don’t see what value there would be in preserving it. It’s such a good location. A 5-10 story residential or mixed use building that takes up the full footprint of the property would be a much better outcome.

I'm honestly surprised Scripps hasn't replaced it with a more suitable facility already.

The Communications Center is hideous, sure, but there must be some sort of KLZ nostalgia at play here...it's the oldest active broadcast facility in Denver, isn't it? And channel 7's been in it for most of its existence...

Oh that would make too much sense. Give them another ten years or so to get a clue.

I did mean ION, yes.

4 hours ago, PhillyWatch said:

The entire reason Scripps gobbled up ion was to get signals to put their diginets on, not to launch (from scratch!) a bunch of news operations. Maybe you'll see a half hour of Newsy on the main signal at some point during the day. Maybe you'll see a new newscast from any new Scripps-owned sister stations in the market. But we're not getting any new news departments out of this. 

I know they were after ION's signals and spectrum, but the thing they trumpeted most of all was ION's national advertising share. Makes me wonder how much COVID battered local advertising...

Scripps must have felt so lucky that they bought Katz in 2017!

They're that centralized, huh? I figured they'd operated on autopilot for a while...

1 hour ago, Weeters said:

They've indicated a few times that they intend to run the Ion stations separate from the rest of their portfolio. I'd be surprised if they tried to do news on them.

And yet they have yet to update Ion's website with the list of stations they held onto...

Don't stations like KILM and WDLI and WLWC eat up the bandwidth of their channel-sharing partners?

With regards to WLWC, The CW got screwed so bad in Providence, didn't they?

It really is something how thoroughly MeTV eviscerated RTV...

Cartoon Network is losing product to HBO Max in large part because AT&T is starving their still-tremendously-lucrative cable networks of resources. Nickelodeon has had their heads up their asses for the last 15 years or so and has spent most of the last decade blasting the sort of "hey, remember us?" messaging typical of organizations that are deathly ill (MGM, pre-Eisner Disney, and pre-Turner Hanna-Barbera all come to mind here). The one hit cartoon they've squeaked out since Avatar was quickly embroiled in scandal. I'm so bothered that that asshole turned Dexter's Lab and PPG to shit, AND co-created Trixie Lulamoon.

SpongeBob has literally outlived its creator and from the sound of it the quality of the animation has improved over the last few years, which is good at least.

The Classic Media catalog actually had some neat stuff in it (Rocky and Bullwinkle, Underdog) but they didn't plumb THAT deep apparently.

Truthfully, with the cable bundle severely ailing, I feel like Scripps has an opening to make Qubo competitive, but of course, that takes money, and whatever in-house advantage they'd have isn't there anymore, because they sold it in 2010...that being Peanuts!

Just now, Adam MadMan said:

When he said "mature", I'm pretty sure he meant "not grown as a brand". Of course, his company decided they don't want to grow the brand, and have put it in the line of corporate fire, like in those stereotypical Mexican executions you'd see on TV.

 

And as for the whole kids thing, Symson said in that same call that he wants diginets to go for a younger audience - which makes the Qubo decision all the more baffling, at least to me. Even if the brand isn't that desirable, Nickelodeon was in a similar state in the early 80s before it turned around under Viacom. Obviously, the times are different now, but it still seems wrong that they're trying to go "younger", yet have decided to leave the youngest viewers of the bunch to digital services such as Netflix and YouTube, like they want over-the-air TV to die off.

The thing about Qubo is that Scripps would likely have to invest big bucks into it to make it even remotely competitive. That would mean spending big on original programming that they'd either produce in-house or otherwise lock down all the rights to. There would also likely be minimal help from the syndication market, since most of the worthwhile content (at least, animation-wise) is owned by Disney, WarnerMedia, ViacomCBS and NBCUniversal, and I can't imagine most of those companies are all that eager to help. They could perhaps look into old TGIF shows or what have you but I can't imagine they come cheap.

Remember The Hub? Not even Hasbro had the acumen or the willingness to spend big to make that network competitive. Were it not for My Little Pony, The Hub would've been even more of a flop than it ended up being.

I'm also under the impression that the TV business has more or less given up on children's shows on linear. Cartoon Network has basically packed it in (if only they hadn't ditched the multi-generational angle they had in their salad days!). The Disney Channel and its offshoots seem to be dying on the vine. Nickelodeon is still one of ViacomCBS's crown jewels and that NFL simulcast indicates some sort of self-preservation instinct. The fact that they have so eagerly flogged their '90s heyday and decided that we didn't have our fill of Rugrats in 1999 helps.

Scripps bought ION because it's cheap and hugely profitable. Qubo will never be a factor without significant investment, and reruns of 20-year-old Nelvana shows aren't going to cut it.

I can't imagine Scripps would've been excited about Qubo eating up spectrum on their new stations if they didn't own it...

The KCDO deal doesn't make a lot of sense, but I suppose Scripps thought Grit deserved a .1 here because we're Out West.

As for the Katz-Univision deal, the press release does say the migration will happen over the next five years...I'm sure Scripps's thinking is like Disney's seeming patience with regards to Marvel screen rights reversion...

re: Qubo

Dozens of Canadian media executives cried out in terror...

It's a cue they took from the 20th Century Fox logo itself.

I thought The WB jumped over from KXTX to KDAF right away. I know they were only doing two nights of primetime a week though...

I love me some flashy 3D stuff, for sure, but local TV in general seems to lack an understanding of building a multimedia brand. TEGNA has a lot of issues but they have a ton of stations that would sure as hell rather swim than sink.

Armin hardly EVER acknowledges local TV...