Rusty Muck

KYUS-TV fell silent on New Year's Day but forgot to file the STA paperwork until two weeks ago.

They probably had no choice in the matter as YTTV, Hulu and Fubo were under no obligation to continue carrying an independent station. And why would they? It's only a matter of time before Berkshire Hathaway puts WPLG up for sale in a liquidation.

The Sturlaugsons didn't even want KXGN-TV. It's obvious that KDZN-FM propped up channel 5 and just about everything else. Just as much as KYUS-TV was only being run as a public service and relayed KULR at no charge to Cowles. WJSU and WCFT say hello.

NBC hasn't been in Glendive since KXGN dropped the subchannel on January 1. While KYUS-TV has been silent since that same time, KULR does has a translator in Miles City, a tiny one at that.

So both KXGN and KYUS are joining Montana PBS later this year. Both were sold to Montana State University for $375,000.

"powergate92" on RadioDiscussions found the bankruptcy docket and this looks really bad. I'll quote them: "So I found the bankruptcy docket. It looks like the plan is for Merit Street assets to be sold at auction with final sale to be completed by the end of September." Here's the link to the dockets.

Scripps isn't selling anything. This setup was deliberately engineered so KOAA can merge directly into KKTV, which recently got new studios. When it gets approved, Scripps will have the Big Three affiliations in Colorado Springs with KRXM as the only tangible competition. Likewise, when Gray buys Allen as a whole, the husk known as KADN/KLAF can easily merge into KATC.

How much money are these companies going to throw at Carr and Trusty to pay them off is the real question. Paramount Global threw away $16M so they could merge into Skydance, after all, and Gray, Nexstar and Sinclair know how to butter up the right people so they can get their way. It's a battle of the shameless.

And sure enough, that's what happened:

Don't look now but WSVN launched a subpage devoted to "ABC Miami 18".

It may not be what people want to hear, but it is the truth: Byron Allen's hubris and utter incompetence destroyed the value of these stations. Whomever would buy them would have to sink embarrassingly large amounts of money just to get them back up to par with their competition. How is that not damaged goods? This FCC will simply let it happen thanks to kickbacks and bribes to Brendan Carr and Olivia Trusty. And you think Perry Sook has ever cared about the viewers? His greed and lust for power makes R.J. Fletcher look scrupled. The Tribune purchase handcuffed them regulation-wise. It is no secret that Nexstar wants to buy the CBS owned-stations, Gray and Cox Media and even put out a press release stating they openly covet the ABC-owned stations.

There's two EWTNs: the first is the channel that shows masses for shut-ins and daily rosaries (along with Bishop Sheen reruns). The second is the news service, which is to the right of OAN and Newsmax. Raymond Arroyo is their lead "anchor" when he's not chumming up with Laura Ingraham, a friendship that goes back to her conversation to the Church 20 years ago. The Vatican is in a tough spot, it's not like there's enough of an audience to justify the existence of a competing network with a more liberal ideology. It always had been a euphemism for the right-wing. CBN, TBN, PTL and even individual televangelists have had those beliefs for practically forever.

The Ansin family literally developed Miramar from the beginning. The only thing that kept them from redeveloping the island was getting the WIOD side and their towers (the island was partitioned in 1962 after Biscayne Broadcasting lost the license for channel 7–which saw a replacement license awarded to Sunbeam—and AM 610 was sold back to Cox Media).

She platformed Phil and Mehmet Oz! Good luck trying to figure out who has been worse or more damaging in the long run.

The alternative is having them all go under because no one wants a bunch of damaged or destroyed goods that Byron ruined with his ineptitude and ego. Nexstar are Gray are the prohibitive favorites because they somehow and inexplicably keep getting money to finance their purchases, plus it's no secret that Perry Sook just wants to own everything. It's again the perfect test case for unfettered deregulation by Brendan Carr provided that the buyer is someone he likes, and he likes Nexstar. Run them as rumps of their existing properties. WJRT becoming an appendage of WNEM, WAAY as an appendage of WAFF, etc. It'll cost way too much money for anyone else to bring those stations back up to par in an already contracting industry.

Deltavision is a company that had for whatever reason a lot of money to incinerate on rapidly declining assets in unfavorable areas. All my money (and all of everyone else's tbh) should be on Gray or Nexstar buying the entire Allen chain under failing station waivers. The FCC sure as heck won't challenge it and it'd probably be the catalyst for unfettered deregulation on their end.

The 18.1 placement really doesn't matter for anything but cable carriage. Not that it matters because LPTVs are excluded from must-carry rules.

Los Angeles is the market that can sustain such ludicrous amounts of newscasts (and that's including stuff not really news i.e. police chases with people doing it solely for the attention). And it's not like Nexstar wants to use KTLA to actually develop non-news shows, that's crazy talk.

That’s probably going to happen within weeks. It underscores how much of a contradiction Miami is. One half is extremely superficial and transient, the other half are the deeply paleoconservative Cuban emigres for which WPLG was blatantly pandering to with the “no bias” tagline. Neither of those groups would seem receptive to national and world news (the latter likely only regarding Cuba and for the most cynical of reasons). Unlike others here and elsewhere, to me, this feels like a recipe for disaster for WPLG. I can’t exactly give them or WANF any real chance for success when the industry is encountering so many headwinds and with syndication becoming extinct.

The notion of over-diluting one’s brand with too much local news continues to feel self-destructive. In what way is WPLG going to benefit by airing more news to a smaller overall audience? And especially when they are simply Xeroxing the 6:30 network newscast, which is itself a game of total attrition? To be blunt, WPLG might just be the biggest blotch on what was a sterling career for Warren Buffett. His successors can’t wait to offload it to Nexstar.

Better Gray buys them than Coastal, who is the only other plausible buyer. Not even Marquee would waste money on these clunkers.

It absolutely has. Those stations are permabroken and destined to be rumps of their former Gray competition. No one else is going to waste their money on properties Byron Allen squandered.

Why would Hearst—or any group not named Gray—waste money like that? Allen destroyed those stations to the point where any buyer is going to have to burn money just to get them back up to par. Talk about a money pit. The only obvious outcome is Gray buying the OW stations (along with the rest of the Allen stations) and they become shells of WSAW and WMTV. They all qualify for failed station waivers.

So they can all run MeTV off the bird? Why would Hearst waste their time with the beyond-broken OW stations? They don't need full-power satellites for WISN, which is all they would be.

Not only is CBS unwilling to buy anything (they haven't since ... what, when they merged into the first Viacom?? in 2000??) they're also stuck with three stations they can't sell: WUPA, KSTW and WTOG. I betcha if no regulations existed anymore, Nexstar would have grabbed WUPA and KSTW as CW-owned stations. But since the 39% cap still exists, CBS can't get rid of them. Putting CBS on WUPA is the path of least resistance, plus it gives this miasma soon to be known as ParamountSkydance another local digital platform to have once viewership totally dries up and CBS becomes nothing more than a brand name for P+ and Pluto.