T.L. Hughes

Thanks to this, TIL, the lead singer of The Smashing Pumpkins, for some reason, has owned a wrestling promotion for six years.

I stumbled upon this on Logopedia (yes, there’s a wiki for logos), apparently the Montana Television Network has updated its logo, dropping the longtime mountain outline emblem used in some form since 1969.

It was inevitable, another one of WGN’s old guard is calling it quits… and this time it’s the king of Chicago weather. Tom Skilling has announced that he will retire as WGN’s chief meteorologist next year, after 45 years with the station. His last day will be February 28, 2024.

The San Antonio Spurs have cut a deal with Tegna to broadcast 11 regular season games on KENS this season, starting with the November 20 home game against the Los Angeles Clippers. All of the games (including the lone non-prime time game, a February 10 away game against the Brooklyn Nets scheduled for a 5:00 tip-off) will preempt CBS prime time programming in some capacity on those dates. Bally Sports Southwest’s San Antonio-area feed will carry 61 other regionally exclusive Spurs telecasts for 2023–24, while four additional games (presumably produced by BSSW) will be broadcast locally on WOAI-DT2. (In its article about the KENS deal, NextTV misidentified the secondary OTA carrier as KMYS, failing to recognize Sinclair’s 2021 decision to move that station’s CW and syndicated programming to a WOAI subchannel.)

Thanks for the correction. Remembering how the Thunder move went about, the Sonics name and trademarks remained in Seattle for use by a future expansion franchise; the Clay Bennett-led ownership group also agreed to share the Sonics’ team history between the Thunder and a future Seattle franchise. So, the (original) Hornets not allowing for a similar arrangement with the city of Charlotte before the fact looks like they were less sure that Charlotte would snag a new expansion team (and agree to build a new stadium) down the line.

Lowell Register was the one who did that, and that decision was moreso guided by his more socially conservative views. Gray owns WPGA now, so the content of network programming doesn’t matter; all that matters is whether Gray can snap up a major network affiliation. (BTW, WPGA, under Register, was with Fox for the station’s first six months of operation until WGXA took over the affiliation.)

Technically, such a concept could develop localized RSN-like sub-feeds that carry the main MLBN national schedule most of the time, and allow for breakaways for games and team-related programming. However, MLBN carries some live game broadcasts during the MLB regular season and postseason that games from local teams could preempt, so it’s not the most feasible option. Creating a group of local MLBN channels separate from the national version is a non-starter because of the potential impact on carriage fees for carrying both.

This, however, poses a Catch-22 for Scripps. The subchannels that will carry the Coyotes games don’t have satellite or vMVPDs to rely on for additional distribution, unlike with KTVK (which has enough available options to view most Suns and Mercury games shown on the station that it mitigates any risk to the revenue stream Gray gets from its pay-TV carriage). Dish and DirecTV/DTV Stream subscribers thus would have to resort to either using an antenna or switching to a cable provider that carries the subchannels (e.g., Cox) to see the games. (Reception issues come into play for residents living in hillier regions of Arizona served by KNXV, KGUN and certain translators of theirs; luckily, the planned Coyotes streaming service will be an available backup option for those who have trouble receiving the OTA signals reliably.) Thus, Scripps would technically be risking taking a loss in subscriber fees from defecting customers of providers that carried BSAZ that can’t view the KNXV/KGUN subchannels on their lineup, a risk that it could mitigate by putting the games on the wider-distributed CW stations it owns in Phoenix and Tucson. Scripps and other station groups still rely on that revenue, even as the un-level carriage negotiating power by media companies (through the poorly regulated and long-broken retransmission consent structure) is responsible for accelerating the downturn of the pay-TV ecosystem.

After it acquired the station earlier this year, Marquee had planned to launch a standalone news department for KNIN, which would have given Boise four television news departments for the first time since 2011, when KTRV shut down theirs not long after it lost the Fox affiliation to KNIN during the network’s reverse comp disputes with several sub-60 affiliates (KTRV, then owned by Block, was one of the only non-Nexstar/Mission stations affected). This new news share agreement with KBOI, either indicates they’re putting those plans on hold for a while or have called them off entirely.

I dunno, it would have been feasible to delay CW programming until late evening, once game-delayed editions of KASW and KWBA’s prime time newscasts concluded. By not putting the games on KASW and KWBA, Scripps put the Coyotes at somewhat of a coverage disadvantage in comparison to the Suns and Mercury, given that KTVK (which is/will be carrying most of their games) has distribution on satellite, YouTube TV and DirecTV Stream, while KNXV and KGUN’s DT2 subchannels (due to them being Antenna TV and Laff affiliates, respectively) as well as KUPX and KSTU-DT2 in Salt Lake City (both of which will be alternating carriage of Coyotes telecasts there, and the latter lacking satellite and vMVPD coverage for the same reason as KNXV and KGUN subs) have no pay TV distribution beyond cable in their respective markets. Between this issue and the Coyotes planning to launch their own streaming service for the games, some ‘Yotes fans (read: those that subscribe to satellite or DirecTV Stream) have good reason now to cord-cut. (Cable subs in those areas just have to switch to a different channel.) Although I saw the writing on the wall for Bally Sports Arizona when the Diamondbacks, Suns and Mercury all ditched, it’s interesting they didn’t choose to carry on with the Coyotes, other than for financial reasons. It wouldn’t have been the only Bally Sports network to center around just one team, given that former owner News Corp/Fox built four of the RSNs around just the Kansas City Royals, San Diego Padres, New Orleans Pelicans and Oklahoma City Thunder (only the San Diego service has lost the rights to their sole team thus far), while compensating for the lack of other team rights by carrying games from the sister RSNs they spun off from. (The New Orleans and Oklahoma feeds were both spun from Fox Sports/Bally Sports Southwest when the Thunder and Pelicans relocated from Seattle and Charlotte, while the Kansas City and San Diego feeds were spun from from Fox Sports/Bally Sports Midwest and Fox Sports/Bally Sports West when the Royals shut down their broadcast/cable syndication service and the Padres cut ties with Cox’s 4SD local access channel, respectively.)

There’s also the issue of what graphics systems are used at the station level, and whether the group-standardized graphics have to be customized to support the station’s existing system.

*ba-da-bum* Seriously though, Yom Kippur is the holiday in question.

As far as NBC goes, through its control of the Victoria, TX market, MMM currently has one station affiliated with the network, KMOL-LD, which is one of only two Big Four stations in its portfolio (along with Victoria’s CBS affiliate, KXTS-LD) that doesn’t air local news in any capacity. (In fact, even to this day, neither KMOL nor KXTS carries news simulcasts from parent station KAVU, unlike the local news setups in several other markets where one company operates two or all three Big Three stations like Lima and St. Joseph.)

Basically, that scheduling of Live… goes back to the final years of WJAR’s tenure as an NBC O&O, predating the launch of the fourth hour of Today, and possibly even tracing to the launch of the third hour (if not that of the short-lived predecessor Later Today).

According to the Post-Dispatch article, KSDK previously used “5 On Your Side Weather” as its weather branding.

An interesting tidbit from the linked article: “In 2006, Gray Media Group’s predecessor, Raycom Media Inc. registered a trademark for the phrase First Alert Weather.” The branding does predate Raycom’s trademarking of it, as many stations have used the “First Alert” brand dating to the late 1990s (e.g., KOCO has been using the brand since it adopted the Eyewitness News 5 moniker and second-generation Hearst “camera” graphics in 1998). This isn’t the first lawsuit between competing stations over a brand: in May 1990, as the format was being rolled out across the country, KOCO (then owned by Gannett) sued KFOR (then owned by Palmer Communications) over their use of the “24-Hour News Source” slogan; KOCO claimed it had held the exclusive rights to the moniker for the Oklahoma City market since 1980. Both KFOR (which adopted the “4 Strong” brand—itself a ripoff of KOCO’s then-longtime “5 Alive” brand—in April 1990, and “Your 24-Hour News and Information Station” slogan about three weeks later) and KOCO (which used the generic “24-Hour News Source” brand) began running hourly news updates and expanded their broadcast days to 24 hours (KOCO on weekdays only, KFOR seven days a week) only a couple of weeks before the suit was filed. While not much is known if they settled, by that Fall, KFOR changed its slogan to “Where the News Comes First, 24 Hours a Day” (Des Moines sister WHO would adopt that same slogan two years later), and KOCO discontinued hourly news updates and cut its overnight programming (which included a news block featuring content from its Gannett sister stations and programming from All News Channel, which bounced between each of Oklahoma City’s Big Three stations during its existence) soon after. (It wouldn’t revert to 24-hour programming until 1994, when it finally picked up World News Now, and began airing classic movies and Westerns on weekends.)

Several CBS stations—most of them O&Os (e.g., WCBS, KCBS, WFOR, KDKA, WBBM), but also about a dozen affiliates (e.g., KOIN, WKMG, WANF [then WGCL], WANE, WCSC)—actually ran Guiding Light in the 10:00/9:00 a.m. hour during the last few years of its run, with LMAD inheriting GL’s alternate timeslots.

With the GrayONE rollout, KSLA has updated its logo, keeping elements of the basic design it has used since Ellis ownership, with the “KSLA NEWS” typeface similar in style to the updated WLBT logo.

To quote one Waldo Geraldo Faldo, “no prob, Bob.”

Actually, there’s another reason; from Variety: Meaning that there’s a risk that WGA writers working for syndicated shows may cost themselves (and their fellow crew members) their existing jobs if the shows can’t fulfill their contracts. It’s important that the writers get a fair deal, but there are other crew members working with them that are being impacted by the strike. That fear of losing their jobs is expressed by several staffers of struck talk shows also interviewed anonymously in the cited Variety article: Making things more complicated: If it’s not cited in the current agreement, forcing shows to continue their production hiatuses when they may not be required to risks creating a wedge between the WGA members and their colleagues on their struck shows since said colleagues have to resume work at some point. (Several daytime shows resumed production during the 2007-08 WGA strike, though The Ellen DeGeneres Show—which had a larger writing staff due to its monologue and comedy segments—received the most heat from striking writers for its resumption.) There are people stuck in the middle with no way out, other than take jobs outside of the industry. By the time the studios and writers do reach a deal (which at this rate, might not happen before the end of the year, don’t quote me on that, since the studios are just waiting out the writers basically rather than submit a satisfactory deal), the syndication business may not be the same. (Fox Television Stations programming EVP Frank Cicha said in the article, “More repeats would just be a quicker death march for syndication. […] It’s a critical time, and if there’s not a way to do original programming, then you can see the end of national syndication.”) That means, we may see stations glutting their lineups with even more news.

Space City Home Network doesn’t exactly convey a place to watch sports. The name’s giving… local version of HGTV. At least rename it Space City SportsNet to drive home that the network is still the home of the Astros, the Rockets and other local teams.

Regarding the WLBT logo, I noticed the arm of the “3” was shortened to match the weight of the callsign font. Ironically, the revised design otherwise is closer to the original 1985–2009 layout (the version used with the standardized Raycom/Gray packages from 2009 until the GrayONE debut had the middle leg extending slightly closer to the top of the “3”’s open loop). The WIS logo is decent; the kerning of the call letters could have been spaced a little closer than it is, and the “I” and “S” made a bit thicker, so it fully matches the weight of the “W” (it can be hard to tell if the weights of all three letters match in certain depictions).

The NBC chimes aren’t really a problem, they were synced OK with the start of the cut… granted, if the timing of each chime was spaced a little bit, it would mesh better. However, the theme wasn’t recut very well; for some reason, they also used that recut in the tease (you can hear it start over from the beginning during the weather tease).

Uh, actually… Storm of Suspicion (which is a Weather Channel original; to summarize, it’s a true crime show dealing with forensic meteorology and how weather factors into the profiled cases) has been in syndication for a couple of years now. Disney Media Distribution, which also syndicates The Good Doctor (due to it being an ABC Signature co-production), did this when Castle was still available in weekend syndication. They switched to this exact airing format c. 2017-18. I’m guessing that since CBS has a content deal with The Weather Channel, and their plan to have the @midnight reboot replace The Late Late Show got stalled by the Writer’s Strike, someone in the network’s programming department thought, "I know of a great show we can put on at 12:35, instead of rerunning Corden into oblivion"?

Actually, Roly is restarting the blog, moving it from WordPress to Substack.