TVIntheDesert

34 minutes ago, mrschimpf said:

I have no real issue with Rachael's show as it still has a base of good to mediocre stations, even if its in late night or early morning timeslots and they still put in effort into the show, and Cheaters...well, that's another evergreen format that can continue as long as low-tier cable networks and MyNet stations need filler content.

 

But, there is Celebrity Page, which you'd think would have been gone four years ago, but continues to air despite a fully lousy affiliate base and timeslots.

Trifecta (the ones responsible for "Celebrity Page") is a "zombie syndicator." They distribute a lot of off-cable shows, but I scratch my head on how they're still in business. 

With the E/I rules loosened a little bit, there are other tiny companies (Telco Productions, do you read this?) who might be going extinct soon. Telco kind of uses a hybrid of the Byron Allen business model (just like Allen, their original productions are low budget) while still acquiring shows from Canada and elsewhere.

3 minutes ago, Myron Falwell said:

Wouldn't be surprised it's "Source: Dude, Trust Me, Bro"

22 minutes ago, Weeters said:

Austin posted in the comments of the Studio 31 video that the music is totally licensed and we can contact "Mark Agent" about it, or somebody named "Gary".

 

 

I'm just curious how they managed to license all these themes.

"Gary" is station owner Gary Cocola, who is the "king of Central Valley LPTVs." He leases most of those channels out to third parties.

They made the "Take Five" "newscast" from KUSK in Prescott, AZ in the '90s look professional.

On 3/24/2022 at 7:46 AM, Greggo said:

Cutting it in the middle of the TV season is … odd. What are stations supposed to do to fill the spot? More news in many cases, I’m guessing. Or double runs of a show they already have the rights to. 

In the case of KTVK, place "ET" back into its longtime home of 6:30pm (until Meredith brass decided to mess with something that had been working for decades).

On 4/1/2022 at 5:29 PM, mrschimpf said:

No more getting to mock The Doctors...what show will I use to be the zombie example of syndication now?

 

 

 

I would say Rachael Ray's talk show, which should have been axed in 2012. Also, has "Cheaters" produced any new episodes since its previous distributor passed away and the syndication rights were bought back by its creator?

9 hours ago, HoosierNewsie said:

In case you haven’t seen Studio 31’s post, KMSG (fixed) in Fresno launched an 8pm newscast. 
 

The music used includes Eyewitness News (for weather) News One Versions 1&2 (for main theme) Impact for a segment and This is Home for Sports… 

 

What’s interesting about this is you can clearly hear the ‘chirp’ in the NewsOne theme from News Music Now’s website…

 

 

 

 

There is no recorded evidence of this, but an LPTV in Phoenix tried to do its own local news in 1993, with News Director/anchor Jack Rebney (better known now for the viral video outtakes from a Winnebago dealers tape he did a few years prior). This was bad, but the "KDMA (K25DM) News" was probably worse.

The previous Channel 53 in Fresno wasn't known for its high production values either:

11 hours ago, Weeters said:

I'm inclined to agree with @Myron Falwell.

 

INSP has no clue how to run a terrestrial television station. It's not part of their current business model. They exist to broadcast a single "socially conservative" cable channel that's chock full of cheap westerns and the leftovers of the old PTL Satellite Network. What on EARTH would these people want with network affiliates? Occam's Razor leads us to the simplest answer: They don't, they want the spectrum.

 

They're going to get all their affiliations yanked the moment they tell the networks that they refuse to broadcast half of their programming over "moral objections" over LGBTQ matters or something. Most of their markets have "friendly" companies already there. Gray/Nexstar/Sinclair/etc will happily gobble up those affiliations, and the networks will defend it if the FCC starts making a deal about them having two or all three of the "Big Three" on one channel. "We had nowhere else to go!"

 

The business model of INSP is threatened by cord cutters, what better way to turn that around than by buying up a bunch of full power, OTA, small-market network affiliates, gutting them, and setting them up to pass through the cable channel ION-style?

 

The BEST case scenario with these stations is they sell off the IP to another existing group.

INSP (and Weigel, which has been on an OTA buying spree for their diginets) know that linear TV skews toward an older audience. This might just be a start of a new trend of seeing these kinds of companies buy traditional affiliated TV outlets and turning them into something radically different, not unlike Educational Media Foundation has been doing in radio. We'll know once this reaches markets larger than Tulsa or Memphis. I'm quite surprised they didn't add Jacksonville to the sale, given how those stations tend to underperform.

1 hour ago, scrabbleship said:

 

The fun thing here is that Cox is in the process of buying KLSR in Eugene and that now sticks out like a sore thumb with Medford/Tri-Cities/Spokane cast aside. 

Not to mention that KLSR, like most of the former Northwest stations they're offloading to INSP, doesn't have an in-house news department.

On 1/29/2022 at 11:42 AM, bmasters1 said:

 

And here's more on the captioning on The Cosby Show (1986 article from The New York Times):

 

https://www.nytimes.com/1986/01/06/arts/cosby-captioning-sparks-dispute.html

Just what I figured. WGBH's Caption Center did the Cosby captions (and used that "CC in the TV screen" logo). They were one of the "big two" closed captioning producers in 1986. Others like VITAC would come later and take away business from NCI and WGBH/TCC.

12 hours ago, channel2 said:

 

Haven't the Sumralls been slowly winding things down for a while?

Yes, they've been focused more on their cable/satellite/OTT networks (World Harvest and FETV) than running OTA stations. They've sold some, but not all, of their stations to like-minded ministry types. One of the exceptions, as you know, was selling their Denver station to what is now known as Estrella Media.

I've looked at the TV schedules for KTVK and KPHO for the next couple weeks, and it appears that they are slowly adding home-grown Gray programming ("Investigate TV" and "The Song") to the weekend lineups. No sign of the "Power Nation" automotive block yet. The Meredith mistakes of the past couple years ("People" and the like) have still yet to be downgraded or removed from the schedule.

"Full Court Press" is still airing on TEGNA's KPNX overnights on Sunday morning, due to a previous syndication contract.

35 minutes ago, mrschimpf said:

Also in the digital age, LeSea/Family might be a little more willing to take a major network affiliation than they were in the 90s since they can just move their main channel schedule to DT2, so WHMB could have also been a last-second candidate.

I highly doubt it. They're still owned by the same Pentecostal family that thinks CBS is "immoral" and "too liberal."

On 10/24/2021 at 9:35 PM, Megatron81 said:

Dish is the worse when it comes to channels going dark always seem to be in a dispute with someone. A few days ago Sinclair extended with Dish for one more week I think it is on Thur that it could end.

But they do have a point. TV stations are losing viewers fast, but want to be compensated even more every year. The NAB is ruthlessly telling their member stations to pursue that retransmission dough, even while extolling free TV options like ATSC 3.0. There's got to be a point where MSO's say "enough is enough, we're losing money."

22 hours ago, polyiguana said:

Nobody wants to run KTVA though. There is only one TV news operation in Alaska because ABC/Fox is a joke, but who will subsidize it? 

Kind of like Casper, Wyoming. Gray was basically running a news monopoly there because KTWO was a laughingstock, even before KYUR's owners bought it.

On 6/27/2021 at 11:03 PM, VHSgoodiesWA said:

This must have been in October or November 1994. I posted the first 8:00 of the 9/17/94 evening news that still used the Fox era opening, bad fit for an NBC but definitely targeting the younger crowd (i.e. Fox local newscasts). Lot of reality-show and MTV-type camera work too in the reports.

 

 

Scripps Howard was doing that with all their Fox-turned-Big 3 stations (note that KNXV launched news with the so-called "Fox attitude" when they knew they were becoming ABC). They didn't have time to change their game plan.

On 6/29/2021 at 10:06 AM, VHSgoodiesWA said:

KXLY in Spokane used Bill Ratner for their voiceover for the better half of the last 20 years, until he was replaced by Brian Lee. Morgan Murphy probably provided Gordon's services to KVEW because it was cheaper to go with him than Ratner. Ratner has done v/os for a lot of major-market stations, like KCRA and KMGH.

 

I'll have to find that Action News open and re-post it soon. The opening was terrible.

 

KNDO's late '90s open was also bad. The music and voiceover recordings were awful...like it came from a cassette tape or cart used ten times before...muffled and the audio was even unstable. And this wasn't a VCR problem. It happened nightly at 'News 23 NBC'.

It must have been a Pacific Northwest small market thing. I remember seeing KTVZ Bend in 1994 and thinking how low budget they were.

33 minutes ago, ColtFromGulfcoast said:

If the Acme thing was the case, then why didn't UPN just go to 33 as part of the deal which saw Acme and Paramount airing each other's networks in groups where one network was missing a station? One would think it would have been a no-brainer.

 

When KASY rejoined UPN after that short break, Paramount had also agreed to have the WB remain on WWHO and WLWC and add it to WTVX. Acme did the same for UPN in Champaign and Knoxville, in addition to keeping it in off hours on KPLRm 

Interesting point. Maybe UPN already had the contract with Channel 25 (KCNG-LP, later KTUD-LP, now completely defunct), and didn't want any breach of contract suit filed by them if they were to affiliate with KFBT. I suspect UPN would have wanted to be on KFBT instead of the low-power, which had a hard time getting on cable at first.

Vegas was a strange market for Sinclair pre-KSNV. The stronger (at the time) Channel 21 decided to go with MyNetworkTV instead of The CW when all that went down 15 years ago.

22 hours ago, tyrannical bastard said:

That makes sense since many of Sinclair's stations dumped UPN for WB around the same time, and WRDC even dumped the network for a few months until both sides made up?   Vegas sent UPN packing and that's why 33 became an independent IIRC...

 

And since WRAZ was tied to WRAL, it was a dream duopoly in the making. 

 

I believe CBC even gave WRAZ a lot of independence from WRAZ unlike most duopolies with a separate facilty in Durham along with separate staffing.  IIRC, that has changed in recent years and more functions have moved over to WRAL's facility.

The Vegas case was strange. Channel 21(KUPN -> KVWB), which was wholly owned by Sinclair, went from UPN to WB. Channel 33 KFBT, had just been sold to a company affiliated with ACME Communications (headed by then-WB president Jamie Kellner) and LMA'd to Sinclair. I think the ownership issue was the reason why they didn't pick up UPN, which ended up on low-power Channel 25.

7 minutes ago, Georgie56 said:

 

I checked, it is on there.

Is it CBSN National or CBSN DFW?

On 3/24/2021 at 5:47 PM, newsman123 said:

WNCN is a dump of a station. Nobody stays very long save a few longtime settled folks.

Their schedule looks better today than they did under their later Media General days, when they were showing third-rate syndicated programming during network off-hours.

I see Scripps is standardizing their ABC stations to have their morning news named "Good Morning (insert city/market here)." Except that they can't do that in Phoenix because KTVK's morning show has been "Good Morning Arizona" for 25 years.

On 11/19/2019 at 9:39 PM, TheRyan said:

Someone was on YouTube commenting that KXXV is "next".  Not sure if he's speaking "insider baseball" or just opining, though.  We'll find out soon if it's KXXV or some other station that gets it next.

KGUN is in the biggest need of a graphics revamp. They're still using Journal-era L3's

On 10/17/2019 at 1:05 PM, newspulse said:

 

Bahakel was/is notorious for running things on the cheap at their stations, so no surprise about everything looking cheap in '99.

On 10/21/2019 at 9:24 PM, Yankees4life said:

I found another. This one is even worse

 

 

KSWT wasn't exactly Pappas' worst property, but they sure made the station an afterthought during their stewardship (besides, the reason why they bought the station was to flip it to Azteca America, and that didn't exactly pan out).

On 10/1/2019 at 8:34 PM, bixpchiphead said:

WTVF NewsChannel5 would like a word...

I know the Phoenix market is hyper-competitive, but isn't KNXV close to the top in some time slots? 

On 9/26/2019 at 12:46 PM, MadMan400096 said:

And here come the P.O.'d big market NFL fans. Dish had better hope they can get a deal with Fox soon.

This shows a lot of people are stupid. They want the networks/stations yet gripe when they have a huge rate increase at the beginning of the year. Shouldn't they be able to put two and two together?

It's not that infrastructure/maintenance costs increased that much. It's mainly programming costs.

On 9/13/2019 at 8:49 AM, sctvhound said:

 

There was a 4-5 year stretch WCIV had poor graphics and music. Albritton treated them as the red-headed step child in their company for years. They hired Leslie Lyles from St. Louis (who used to be on WCBD), and still couldn’t get past a very distant 3rd in the ratings behind WCSC and WCBD. 

 

Even in the early 2000s, they were still running CREFLO DOLLAR at noon. Almost unheard of for a network station in a top 100 market.

 

Their set had this interesting brick look. Then around 2003 they changed to a look showing the Ravenel Bridge (which didn’t open until 2005).

 

It wasn’t until the last 4-5 years when Sinclair started putting money into it that the station started getting more equal with 2 and 5.

A few years ago, Sinclair's WHP-TV Harrisburg was airing "Life Today with James Robison" at noon. It was uncommon, but not necessarily a one-off.

On 9/12/2019 at 8:25 AM, tjt24 said:

Absolutely hideous. This makes the Lottery Ball 5 and the old Cleveland 19 logo look good...

The new WKYC "Circle 3" is reminiscent to KTVK's "Circle 3" circa 1980-82, except for not being italicized.