T.L. Hughes

Again, if Sinclair’s having financial problems that they have to cut newscasts, cut entire news departments and cut outsourcing agreements, they need to either start selling stations to provide an infusion of cash or, at least, completely spin-off Diamond Sports Group if it’s becoming an albatross around Sinclair’s neck. It seems it’s becoming increasingly difficult for the company to maintain the large portfolio it has, while dealing with the financial problems with Diamond Sports that may be responsible for the cuts. Any more cuts to news departments, and we’ll probably see members of Congress send a critical letter demanding an explanation.

Maybe. But, considering a Texas judge presiding over the company’s bankruptcy allowed Diamond to pay the MLB teams they weren’t able to wholly compensate 50% of the fees for their 2023 cycle, anything’s possible. It seems, at least, that some sort of settlement or a court ruling that the teams held the right to exercise the clause (regardless of whether they notified Diamond/Bally Sports beforehand), assuming there was an insolvency clause in the Suns/Mercury contracts that allowed them to seek other broadcast agreements in the event Diamond ever filed for bankruptcy, would likely be coming down the line.

The deal may run into legal issues as Diamond Sports alleges the deal between Gray, Kiswe and the Phoenix Suns violates their contract with the team that was part of a broader deal with its NBA partners that runs through the 2024-25 season.

…and thus marks the beginning of the end of Bally Sports Arizona. Diamond Sports already lapsed on fee payments to the Diamondbacks (a recent court ruling did allow the company to pay half of what it owes to the MLB teams it missed payments to) and the MLB is considering reclaiming its broadcast contracts to its teams; losing the Suns and Mercury means it’s only a matter of time before the Diamondbacks and Coyotes head for the exits.

And, apparently KOB has dropped the Eyewitness News branding after 29 years, leaving WBRE as the only NBC affiliate left that uses the brand.

Clearly, there was some miscommunication, since KWTV initially reported on-air Thursday morning that SkyNews 6 was being sent to assist their coverage.

Both of Griffin Media’s news helicopters sustained damage from a severe weather outbreak that affected Central Oklahoma on Wednesday. One is repairable, the other likely needs replacement. KWTV’s helicopter, SkyNews 9, lost its windshield after accidentally getting hit by large hail by a supercell that produced a tornado near Cole (which was preliminarily rated an EF3). Pilot Jim Gardner was not pleased, and was forced to make an emergency landing: KOTV’s helicopter, Osage SkyNews 6, OTOH, was destroyed for the second time in about 15 years. It was brought over by the station to help with KWTV’s coverage of the storm aftermath, but had the misfortune of parking for the night in a hangar at Shawnee Regional Airport, which was struck by another tornado (from the same supercell that spawned the Cole tornado) that struck the western part of the city just over two hours later (estimated to be at least an EF2): KOTV lost its previous helicopter in June 2007, after it crashed in Sand Springs after clipping the satellite dish of an ENG truck while filming a promo.

Or, at least roll over the existing Helvetica Extended “3” logo to the new design (like what KTVT and WFOR did).

Sinclair has itself to blame, but also has Rupert Murdoch to share it with them. The company chose to grow its station portfolio as fast as it did, even though it had not long before its 2010s buying spree, had quite a bit of debt on its hands. On the RSN front, Sinclair chose to partner with Allen Media to buy the Fox Sports regional networks at a time when cord-cutting was increasing, and exacerbated things by, not long after taking over the company, making fee demands that wound up greatly reducing Bally Sports’ vMVPD distribution to where DirecTV Stream was the only live TV streamer carrying them; this, in turn, made it nearly impossible for the company to be able to pay down the debt it inherited from the purchase. By the time Diamond Sports got Fubo to bring back the Bally Sports networks a few months ago, cord-cutting had reached a point where the costs of a company like Sinclair operating an RSN became prohibitive. Diamond’s financial issues must have some ripple effect on Sinclair’s bottom line to where it’s making cuts to try to recoup the losses, on top of the affected stations’ moribund performance. Of course, a better solution to repay the losses would be to try to divest stations to AMG or other groups with significant cap room and use the proceeds to lower its debt load. I doubt Fox Corporation would’ve made the same mistakes that Diamond/Sinclair did if it had chosen to keep the RSNs; had it still owned them and floated a DTC offering for the RSNs at the same time WarnerMedia, Disney, Paramount and NBCUniversal/Comcast decided to venture into their own streaming services, such a move at an earlier point in time probably would have helped what became the Bally Sports networks and other RSNs weather the impact of cord-cutting somewhat better. Fox would have also had better leverage to secure DTC deals with MLB teams, compared to Diamond, which doesn’t even have groupwide streaming rights for all the teams that Bally Sports holds rights to.

Broadcast licensees are limited to producing no more than 25 hours of local programming per week (15% of the station’s weekly schedule) for a station it operates through an outsourcing agreement (shared services, joint sales and local marketing agreements or some combination) in conjunction with a station it owns and operates outright. While there’s a reason why it was put in place when the FCC revised the LMA rules in 1996, the 25-hour limit logistically no longer makes sense in this day and age, when many stations carry 35+ hours of local programming per week and syndicated programming availability for stations in larger and mid-sized markets has started to decline correspondingly.

So, both WCBS and KDKA were able to keep their existing newscast branding. The odd part is that O&Os that opted to keep their news brand didn’t have separate logos created for the OTA newscasts that reflect their branding (similar to KCBS/KCAL), while the version using the “standardized” wordmark was saved for the local CBS News streaming channels. If the OTA newscast logos were formatted to reflect the newscast title, the “CBS News [city name]” wordmark would probably need to be placed in the box, using the stacked version of the CBS News logo and the city/region name in a smaller point size aligned properly with it. (Granted, that formatting might not translate entirely well in the L3 bug.)

It wouldn’t be included in the Conners package anyway, since the reboot season (albeit disjointed from the original’s continuity to a degree, considering Dan being alive whereas the original’s series finale revealed he died and the events of the final season were a story Roseanne was writing for a book, Harris’s in-canon age not aligning with her birth year in the original, etc.) was directly connected to the parent show. The Conners itself being structured as a continuation series/de facto spin-off.

The network has ordered a third season of FBoy Island, in a deal with the show’s distributor, STX, which had been shopping around the reality dating show after HBO Max canceled it in December (as part of CW minority owner Warner Bros. Discovery’s cuts to the service’s reality slate). The deal to pick up the series also includes the greenlight of a spinoff, FGirl Island.

As it stands now, TV Passport isn’t showing any 11:00 p.m. newscasts on that weekend. It’d seem weird to just launch a 6:00 p.m. newscast (that will be preempted by NCAA basketball tournament coverage on Sunday the 26th) and add the 11:00 later (especially since that’s not how it launched the weeknight editions of both broadcasts), so either the continued listing of syndicated SEAL Team reruns (Saturday) and Joel Osteen’s weekly ministry program (Sunday) in the weekend 11:00 slot is a misprint or WWJ somehow chose to stagger the weekend evening newscast launches.

I’m sure most of the providers they lost were the vMVPDs, to where DirecTV Stream was the only one that carried each of the 19 Bally Sports networks until FuboTV re-added them in January. The irony is, it wasn’t always this way. Many of the RSNs that exist today once were distributed as premium channels that customers had to add onto their cable package (a la HBO and Showtime). The question is how much cost savings would customers have now, if RSNs didn’t transition to basic cable packages, and would RSNs still being made available a la carte offset the cost of carrying other channels that command higher subscriber fees (ESPN, TNT, Disney Channel, etc.)? The 1992 Cable Act’s retrans provisions only created more stress on RSNs in the past decade or so, by helping to drive pay TV prices to be able to carry other channels to progressively higher rates that led to the dramatic increase in cord-cutting… and that’s on top of service and equipment fees that add to the cost of subscribing to conventional pay TV providers. (National sports networks also contribute to the high cost, because of both retrans compensation and sports rights fees, if ESPN’s $5+/subscriber fee is any indication.)

DirecTV is suing Nexstar, along with Mission Broadcasting and White Knight Broadcasting, over the carriage dispute with the two sidecars that has been going on since last October, accusing the companies of price fixing and “engaging in an illegal conspiracy” to manipulate negotiations on retrans fee rates through Nexstar’s SSA/JSAs with the Mission and White Knight stations.

Just for an example, and given how that could affect if KAUT takes over the affiliation, at what point during that timeframe does KOCB’s CW contract expire?

I think this would mark the first time that MyNetworkTV stations not owned by Fox would be available on YTTV, and it fills a major gap in CW affiliate carriage on the service (many are already available on YouTube TV, with CBS and Sinclair being the largest affiliate groups prior to this deal that have carriage agreements for their CW affiliates). In some markets, it means the majority of the major local stations - commercial and public television - will be available on YTTV’s lineup. For example, in Oklahoma City (my home market), it means KAUT will join sister station KFOR (NBC), Hearst’s KOCO (ABC), Griffin’s KWTV (CBS), Sinclair’s KOKH (Fox) and KOCB (CW), Tyler Media’s KTUZ (Telemundo) and KUOK (Univision, which was added this past Fall alongside the existing national Univision feed), and OETA (Oklahoma’s PBS member network). (This leaves KSBI, KWTV’s sister station and the local MyNetworkTV outlet, as the only notable commercial station missing from the lineup.) And subscribers in New York, L.A. and Chicago will get access to WPIX, KTLA and WGN, respectively. CORRECTION: Sinclair’s MNTV affiliates and CW affiliates owned by a handful of other groups including Tegna, Scripps, Sunbeam, Griffin, Bahakel and Graham are apparently also carried on YTTV.

I’m not sure why Fox Weather doesn’t provide local weather segments myself; though, they’d have to make the national automated forecast segments that are run periodically during weekend afternoon and evening programming (as well as during overnight and weekend severe weather coverage, unless there’s a high-impact event worthy of full coverage) a regular part of the schedule to even be able to allow pre-taped local segments produced by each O&O to be inserted over the national feed. As an aside, The Weather Channel doesn’t run localized LOT8s segments or Lower Display Line data on vMVPD providers, even though YouTube TV, Sling, Frndly and FuboTV all offer its sister service, Local Now (which distributes all of its 200+ localized feeds on those platforms, with the feed available to a subscriber being determined by their ZIP Code). I’m surprised TWC, at least, hasn’t developed technology to insert local weather information over the national feed on its vMVPD carriers, such as a version of its IntelliStar or Local Now-style feeds for each DMA. (I receive TWC and Fox Weather via YTTV, and actually suggested such an idea to TWC in an email a few months back.) Either FWX or TWC should look into developing some method of inserting localized weather data on vMVPDs as well as, in Fox Weather’s case, AVOD streamers (i.e., Tubi, Xumo, Roku Channel).

Ironic that they weren’t added to the KSTP and KSTC editions of Eyewitness News Morning as well, where having weather segments at the top of each half-hour would be most useful.

Last time I streamed multiple KSTP newscasts in the same day (which was during the George Floyd protests), they were only doing “Forecast First” segments during 5 Eyewitness News Nightcast. When did it expand the segments to other newscasts?

According to reports, it wasn’t CBS executives that fired Y&R’s breakdown writing staff, it was head writer Josh Griffith, who recently replaced Anthony Morina as executive producer/showrunner… and on top of that, he’s taking over the five-person breakdown staff’s duties (even though some of those duties could’ve been split between both him and the show’s associate head writer, Amanda Beall).

The CW claims the network’s first LIV tournament broadcast averaged more than 3.2 million viewers across linear and digital during the period from February 24-26. (Note that the data cited used info from iSpotTV and internal results by both The CW and LIV.)

I think you mean KCNC.

My point, exactly. Either way, the numbers weren’t there to get the FCC to agree to the deal. The Republican members were going to overlook the glaring issues with the deal, and the Democratic commissioners wouldn’t have in both scenarios. Standard General should’ve known that aligning with Apollo, but not rectifying the conflicts between Tegna and Cox in a palatable manner was going to end in the deal’s failure. Sinclair’s deal to buy Tribune ended in an ALJ referral and Tribune subsequently cutting bait because of a similar “wanting to have your cake and eat it too” mentality when it came to market conflicts. At least Apollo didn’t attempt to transfer the Cox stations into shell companies and enter them into SSA/JSAs with the Tegna stations, like Sinclair tried to do with many of the Tribune stations… although the intertwining interests would have made Cox a pseudo shell for the conflicts.