T.L. Hughes

Confusingly, despite the Fox name being dropped from the news branding, the new on-screen bug kept the old “WBRC Fox 6 News” branding in the new logo style and old design layout. So, either this was an oversight or Gray wasn’t sure that Fox would give approval for the station to remove the network’s branding when GrayONE was being retrofitted for WBRC’s use, and the original intention was to keep the previous title in place before Fox gave them the greenlight to alter the station’s branding.

If you saw the bug on the 6 News Now intro, the Fox logo remains in the station’s logo alongside the revived ABC-era “6”. So, unless they plan to keep the network logo but deemphasize the “Fox” branding verbally or modify the logo to remove the Fox logo once the package officially launches, it seems like the “WBRC Fox 6” brand will remain in place. WVUE and WALA have kept their Fox branding after switching to the package; to date, Gray stations that have dropped network branding have usually made the change before (like with WMTV and KOSA) or when they switched to GrayONE. Fox has stricter branding guidelines than other networks, and has been pretty selective in allowing affiliates to eschew network references (like it did with WSVN, WDRB, KVRR, WFXT and, before Fox bought it and to a lesser degree, KTVU), so it’s unclear whether Gray will be given the same license to deemphasize network branding.

Months after TVNewsCheck briefly suspended daily site updates and feature articles, on Monday (August 6), Future plc announced it will cease publishing the print editions and daily newsletters of venerable broadcasting industry magazines Broadcasting & Cable and Multichannel News effective September 30, after 93 and 34 years, respectively. Future’s Next TV will relaunch its website as a single portal combining reporting from all three brands in the fall (B&C and MCN already have subpages on the website), and will continue distributing its “SmartBrief” newsletter to cover streaming, broadcasting and pay-TV industry stories.

The Times-Picayune article linked above indicated this is in the works:

So, that means Bally Sports New Orleans will go bye-bye, since the channel was built around the Pelicans. Since the Oklahoma City Thunder are also among the five NBA teams that it is/was considering dropping before the 2024-25 season starts (the Pelicans were among them), it wouldn’t be the last Bally Sports network centered around a single local major league team that will be on the chopping block, as Bally Sports Oklahoma will likely follow suit, if Griffin becomes the Thunder’s long-term broadcast partner (a couple of Gray stations, including KSCW and KSWO, were among those that carried the games sublicensed to KSBI/KOTV-DT2).

…and @RustyMuck was so certain that The CW would be locked out of those two markets. Anyway, funny that Paramount/CBS gave up its CW affiliations last year, only to now agree to bring the network back to WKBD and add WBFS (which The CW passed over in favor of WSFL through its charter affiliation deal with Tribune) as an affiliate. This was totally out of left field.

Uhh, Cox commissioned Stephen Arnold to create Stream for WFXT and WHBQ, both Fox affiliates. As far as the KAKE graphics becoming a group package, Lockwood only has four news-producing stations (WTNZ, WPGX and WDFX outsource their newscasts to Big Four stations in their respective markets), so KTEN and WCAV/WVAW would be the only ones left to switch.

Here are a couple of the opens: …and I get what @NYCshorty said, the graphics and open style would fit as a Fox O&O package, as components of it blend better with the network’s current graphics style than the actual O&O package does.

Extremely redundant with Oxygen, which has the same format and parent company (Comcast/NBCUniversal), and is also available OTA. Funny enough, KUOT-CD carries both networks on neighboring subchannels (American Crimes on 22.4 and Oxygen on 22.5). That said, the former LX had been adding more true crime shows to its lineup since it shifted from news to lifestyle programming (as LX Home).

The reason The King of Queens is leaving broadcast syndication is because Sony Pictures Television has cut a deal to bring it and Married… with Children to Cozi TV’s lineup. King will join the network’s prime time lineup (displacing Frasier in the 8:00-10:00 p.m. ET slot) on September 9, while Married… (following an eight-hour marathon two days before) joins the late afternoon schedule on August 5 (replacing Monk in the 4:00-6:00 p.m. ET slot).

Free TV Networks has acquired the naming rights and programming inventory of Defy TV from Scripps, which repurposed the (original) Defy’s former channel space for an OTA relaunch of Ion Plus (a farm of 2000s-2010s dramas carried by other Scripps networks, former Ion/Pax originals and obscure CanCon and ‘90s-early 2000s first-run syndicated series that Scripps relegated to AVOD streaming shortly after acquiring Ion Media in 2021). Free TV Networks relaunched Defy (dropping “TV” from the name, but keeping the logo used by the Scripps iteration) on Monday (July 1) with much of the same programming lineup as the original network. The Free TV Networks iteration of Defy was originally announced in April to be launched as Dare, intended as a copycat to the original Defy (similar to how The 365 and Outlaw are copycats to Bounce TV and Grit, both of which FTVN CEO Jonathan Katz once oversaw), with FTVN cutting a deal with A+E Networks to air unscripted content from its library (the network also initially intended to reuse The CW’s former “Dare to Defy” slogan, which was changed to “Dare to be Bold” for the “relaunch”).

I thought something was different; I noticed the change earlier during coverage of a standoff that resulted in an officer getting shot and hospitalized. That the set is being updated/replaced only two years after the station moved to its downtown studio is odd, especially considering KWTV’s last three sets at their old Kelley Ave. building were used for progressively long stretches. Their final set at the Kelley building was built in 2004 (lasting for 18 years), the set before that (inspired by the WCCO set introduced not too much earlier) was built in 1993-94 (lasting for ~10 years), and the set before that was built in 1985-86 (lasting ~8 years).

Michael Steib has been named the company’s President, CEO and Director, succeeding David Lougee, who will remain with Tegna in a Senior Advisor role.

Former WRTV news anchor Tanya Sumner (neé Spencer), who later became a town council member in the Indianapolis suburb of Whitestown after leaving journalism, has died at 53 from complications from a rare form of colon cancer she was diagnosed with in November 2022. https://deadline.com/2024/05/tanya-sumner-dead-news-anchor-indianapolis-abc-affiliate-wrtv-1235941409/

CNBC is reporting that WBD appears to be pivoting from matching NBCUniversal’s bid for the “B” package that TNT currently holds towards matching the offer for the new “C” package framework that the league negotiated with Prime Video (encompassing regular season games, the In-Season and Play-In Tournaments, and alternating rights to a conference finals series). That package is expected to go for between $1.8 billion–$2 billion, slightly lower than the $2.4 billion that NBCU is likely to offer for the “B” package. The Streamable points out that the plan for Max to switch its Bleacher Report Sports content to a paid add-on could be a wrinkle in that regard, unless it’s willing to make it a permanent no-extra-fee offering (a la Prime Video’s sports content), but that Venu Sports could help bridge the gap (although Prime Video already has a wide subscriber reach built in, though having a larger streaming-only package of NBA could pose issues, especially given recent political posturing over streaming-exclusive college football games on ESPN+).

Paramount and WBD should have only sold a combined 33% of their stakes in The CW to Nexstar, rather than giving up all but 25% of the network. By offloading the majority of the network to Nexstar, the company’s strategy for The CW seems to hinder it more in the name of making it profitable while making it more difficult for the network to make it into the black (even though they claim it’s slashed the network’s operating deficits, while simultaneously stating that the network’s revenue will soon no longer be disclosed publicly) by driving away its existing audience through the replacement of its more costly but better produced shows with low-cost fare and imports that make it less competitive with the Big Four. It makes you wonder what the network would look like under a Paramount/WBD/Nexstar equal partnership. Would the programming be much like the CW pre-Nexstar or a hybrid of the old and new formats?

The service now has a name: Venu Sports.

There is a Speculatron thread for Sinclair’s possible station sales that a lot of these comments can be put into.

Is Weather Unfiltered a new show or just a rebranding of Weather Underground? Considering the show was created when TWC and the Weather Underground website were under the same ownership, it sounds more like a brand licensing agreement to use the WU name for the show lapsed (separate from TWC’s existing content agreement with The Weather Company) and they rebranded the show accordingly. It always struck me as odd that AMHQ had been extended to the noon ET slot during severe weather situations, rather than extend WU one hour early, given AMHQ’s (as its full and abbreviated names indicate) intended as a morning show. (Granted, it’s still morning in the rest of the country while it’s noon in the Eastern Time Zone, but up until now, dating back to at least the 1995 creation of WeatherScope (although there was no daypart-based titling for that program from 1996 until the relaunch of its forecast shows under the Weather Center brand in 1997), noon ET was usually the delineation between TWC’s morning and afternoon schedules.) And, at least, the network added an hour of non-documentary programming on weekends, even if it’s not technically a weather forecast program.

Sam Rubin, KTLA's entertainment reporter for 34 years, died today (May 10) from a heart attack at age 64. https://www.tmz.com/2024/05/10/sam-rubin-ktla-entertainment-reporter-dead-dies-heart-attack/

Harry J. Pappas, co-founder of Pappas Telecasting Companies (whose stations have since become part of Sinclair's broadcasting portfolio), died on April 24 in Reno, Nevada. He was 78. https://deadline.com/2024/05/harry-j-pappas-dead-pappas-telecasting-companies-founder-1235910952/

Thing is, WPIX runs 59 1/2 hours of newscasts per week (approximately 35% of its airtime), along with several additional local shows (10 extra hours), and the entire CW schedule (15 hours of primetime, a three-hour E/I block and an hour-long political talk show, plus sports).

Weigel is launching another diginet, MeTV Toons, on June 25. Pretty much an outgrowth of MeTV's existing Monday-Saturday cartoon blocks (Toon In with Me and Saturday Morning Cartoons) and a broadcast equivalent of Boomerang (both its original all-classic cartoon format and its current daytime-only classic block), it will feature shows and shorts like Looney Tunes, Scooby-Doo, Tom & Jerry, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Yogi Bear, Popeye, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Woody Woodpecker, Casper, Betty Boop, and Speed Racer. Bob Bergen, the voice behind various Looney Tunes characters (like Porky Pig, Tweety and Marvin the Martian), will be the announcer for the network.

Should we move this thread to the Breakroom section? Seems like it fits there.

Oh, yeah, I did forget about Texas. Its creation also led to Another World being cut down from 90 minutes back to the then-newly standard one-hour format, after only 17 months in the longer runtime, and contributed to the half-hour Doctors' demise by bumping that soap from its 3:00 p.m. ET slot to 12:30 (where it would be more vulnerable to preemption by some affiliates), putting it in direct competition with Ryan's Hope and (within a year of moving to that slot) The Young and the Restless. Search for Tomorrow's move to NBC soon prompted The Doctors to move up a half-hour to noon ET, dragging down ratings even more in its final year.