Rusty Muck

They could just drape it the entire set in all-black.

VCBS now has a Sword of Damocles hanging over Nexstar, and WJMN was a warning shot. They could easily threaten to void the entire damn contract at any moment.

WOIO at least planned ahead. This looks like Lilly had to slap it together in 2-3 hours.

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They renewed after CBS made a power move on them. Make no mistake, WZMQ was a total power move. They proved Perry Sook has a glass jaw and it shattered into a million pieces. If I'm with the other networks, I'm salivating my chops because this means I can get anything I want just by threatening another WJMN on them.

If Nexstar botched this as badly as they apparently did - and this was a royal botching just handing the CBS affiliation straight up to Lilly, let alone having all their CBS affiliates on a day-to-day basis - I'm not sure I would have them as a favorite to get the CW.

So 1.) Lilly was desperate enough to make WZMQ a CBS affiliate and 2.) Nexstar just let them have it because LOL market #180. This is an FTV scenario on an acid trip. A BAD acid trip.

I’m not intending to go into Speculatron mode, but what’s to say that Nexstar is the only one vying for the CW? Look at the combined footprint for Scripps and Inyo. The CW+ can be a turnkey Katz network with Newsy supplying news.

This is deeply abnormal behavior between two companies supposedly negotiating to transfer majority control of a mid-major broadcast network. Something’s up.

"Snow Shoers" on Monday, these must be outsourced from KABC

Well, it's official. Welcome to CBS, WZMQ 19.2

Uhhh... that's making me wonder if @mrschimpf is onto something with WBAY.

"It was a terrible TV station, but it was better than paying the government" SMH

The contract had to have been simply voided by either CBS or Nexstar. Otherwise it's purely nonsensical.

Well, SOMETHING had to have happened between CBS and Nexstar in order for this mess to transpire the way it did.

The only thing that comes close to this mess is when ABC yanked the affiliation off WSVI with only 48 hours notice, and the VI cable company was as confused as anyone else. Meanwhile, I feel for the Lilly engineers that are scrambling to Marquette right now just to make sure Drew Carey doesn't look flat at a pancake in glorious 2.15Mbps

Get a load of this mux. Nothing like having to air CBS programming in freaking 480i because you didn't get enough advance notice.

Nope. The cap will never be eliminated, or will it be expanded. Odds are high that the UHF Discount is a goner if but to remove one of the few things Pai actually enacted (which itself was a political response to Tom Wheeler scrubbing it the first time). Heck, a case could be made that Sinclair's mishandling of their attempted purchase of Tribune did in Pai's plans for further dereg, and if HE couldn't get it done...

If the CW Plus (which I would assume is also being sold) is used as a fulcrum for replacement affiliations on .2s, then it's their call. But forcing NewsNation onto the CW creates more problems than it solves. Is it enough? Remember that Nexstar isn't in every market.

And anger all the affiliates owned by Sinclair, Gray, Scripps and Hearst? Yeah good luck decimating the affiliate base trying to push a proprietary news service that practically no one is watching.

Plus Circle is one of the better diginets out there, mostly thanks to the Ryman-WSM connections.

Thing is, Shep is hosting a specialty show on a business channel that’s running up against one of MSNBC’s star opinion hosts (Joy Reid). I doubt there were any expectations for his show in the first place, certainly nothing like NewsNation had. Nexstar may have no choice but to sell off the transponder space. What do you do with a channel that just blew up their prior identity and is slowly shedding their non-news program inventory? They can’t just snap a finger and go back to WGN America. I think what’s striking here is how Perry and Sean Compton are totally repeating the mistakes that doomed Al Jazeera America five years ago, when the lessons were blatantly obvious in this Broadcasting & Cable op-ed:

The Pax TV—i—ION metamorphosis is very interesting to look at in retrospect. You could argue that Pax TV was a diginet 25 years ahead of its time with a lineup heavy on reruns (albeit with a few new productions) and in which the affiliates all but carried the core schedule with no deviations whatsoever. Problem was, Pax TV was a money loser from the get-go, so much so that they turned to NBC for a capital investment that wound up with NBC suing Paxson a few years later for a redemption of their investment (and vice versa) with an NBCU board member succeeding Bud Paxson as chairman. Indeed, i had a programming deal with WBTV for a number of sitcom reruns but it clearly didn’t last long at all, as the lineup became nearly subsumed by infomercials near the end of the 2000s. Rebadging as ION and focusing on procedural reruns has given them an identity they never had prior, and it now adds a piece to the overall pie of genre channels that Scripps/Katz aims to offer.

It may take a year or two but I gotta believe that the ION stations—both Scripps-owned and Inyo-owned—will ultimately follow the same subchannel mux, with any co-owned stations that use the parent station’s spectrum filling in any gaps. For example, WDLI 17.1 as CourtTV transmits over WVPX’s spectrum, which has a 23.3 subchannel missing (but RF wise is over a 22.9 subchannel). But definitely, Doozy and Defy look to be in-house replacements for HSN and QVC. And for those ION outlets with only one of those shopping channels currently, they can carve out 480p subchannel space to accommodate.

The likeliest outcome does not involve the mass selling of stations, but is twofold: 1.) The holding company for the RSNs goes bankrupt and taken over by creditors who can resolve debts. In fact, that happened with Comcast’s ill-fated Houston RSN. If Sinclair were to offload their stake now, they would be getting hosed big-time. 2.) Sinclair winds up like Granite, but in too big to fail mode. (Actually, a better comparison would be iHeart and Cumulus when they entered Chapter 11. You’ll note that there was never a fire sale of stations for either radio operator but it killed off whatever M&A mindset existed for the radio industry.) But indeed, there are multiple stations that Sinclair can cut to the bone like Granite did to WKBW. Sure, a white knight investor like Byron Allen could swoop in, but only if the Smith family is stripped of control of the company. But by then, would it be worth it for Byron?