The conspiratorialist side of me says that this is all set up in advance as a way for the Saudis to get to buy into the PGA. The PGA, I believe, is a non-profit. No way to buy into a non-profit except maybe through a backdoor merger like this.

Monahan and a bunch of key executives probably got payoffs and retention bonuses as well. That's what happens with all these mutual insurance companies that get gobbled up by another company, especially for profit companies.

You were all played.

You know this is a dying industry when all of these companies are being scooped up by banksters and bottom fisher low rent broadcasters like Byron Allen. 

54 minutes ago, TVLurker said:

so is Saudi Arabia money dirty or not? you make it sound like the SG/TEGNA deal's dirty money mattered and this doesn't.

It isn't dirty money for every place else they spend it. It isn't dirty for Tiffany's, it isn't dirty when some sheik has have his cancer cured at the Mayo Clinic, it isn't dirty when they buy F16's from us, but it's dirty for something as insignificant as golf? The people who allowed themselves to get sucked into the propaganda that Saudi involvement was somehow dirty were just basically puppets and used by the PGA and the networks. That's the bottom line.

I still laugh at the people who were trying to turn this into this being about Saudi involvement. Like nobody would ever dream of taking dirty money in this country. (Not saying Saudi money is dirty, but that's what they were trying to make it sound like.)

All this time it was about squashing a competitor, which is what I said in the first place.

I want you all to remember how you were used and now apply this lesson to everything else you hear in the media, especially when it comes from Washington.

I would think it would be pretty easy for a Lilly to fire up an LPTV in Guam. It's not like there's going to be a lot of competition for signals there.

Brad Underwood leaves WKRC.

https://www.wvxu.org/media/2023-06-01/brad-underwood-leaves-wkrc-news-tvkiese

3 hours ago, Breaking News said:

Scott from ftvlive.com had a write up about it.

https://www.ftvlive.com/sqsp-test/2023/6/3/sinclair-broadcast-group-is-no-more

During the Yolanda /Gabe era on NewsCenter on ABC6. Suzi came on and did some health reports for a couple of years. It was 2002-04/05 and left. Some on said she was sister or sister in law to Shawn Ireland. I remember Suzi on FOX 28 Kids' Club.

Yes, Susie Gilbert, which I believe is her real name, and Shawn Ireland, which is not her real name (I believe it's Pam Gilbert), are sisters.

Which begs the question, what did they call Shawn Ireland at work? Did they call her Shawn or did they call her Pam? Calling her by her stage name in real life is kind of weird, but if they call her by her real name, they might screw up on the air.

Incidentally, I've seen signed checks from the actor Eddie Albert signed Eddie Albert, even though his real name was Edward Albert Heimberger. There's a Heimberger Road in Fairfield County and it's named after his dad's side of the family. Even though Eddie Albert wasn't from here, his dad was.

Sinclair always had a fetish for leveraging content. It makes sense if they use three stations' resources to do something one station couldn't do on its own, but if you're going to take the same cheap product and just eliminate duplication by doing it once, I don't know if that benefits you much.

Here's an example of something from the 1980s when they tried to do a kids show called "Take 1" for all three stations they owned.

8 hours ago, mrschimpf said:

Look at the sidebar and ticker with extremely inane and degenerate gambling figures and statistics from Bally. Outside of direct friends or family and university students that are only there to watch the game, their viewership is either the lowest of the low bettors, oddballs who refuse to watch paid sports networks for some reason, or sports bars that need to fill one of their eighteen screens during the day.

The seedy underbelly of sports is out in the open. It didn't really occur to me that  gambling was driving much of the interest in sports until the internet came around and gambling became more omnipresent.

Stadium is garbage. The only thing I ever see on there are these lesser universities nobody has ever heard of. Like who's going to watch a University of Akron basketball game?

12 hours ago, Samantha said:

 

The best way to phrase that is that the license is not, but Hearst replaces Waterman as its service provider and will handle all the operations under (an amended version of) the original 1994 LMA.

Wouldn't it be better to just lease time on one of these sidecar stations? Or does the FCC not allow that?

1 minute ago, mre29 said:

In that c

 

In that case, I'd like to know its opinion of the ownership situations in Lima, OH, and Victoria, TX.

 

Lima hasn't been shutting down stations. They just bought a few LPTVs and are running them better because they have economies of scale. The FCC also doesn't care if a full power station owns LPTVs in the same market. I don't know what Anchorage is like, but they are a larger DMA and might be able to support more than one owner in that market. Lima is a small DMA, I think 190 or something like that. However, they're over the air population is large, I think 800,000 or a million maybe.

31 minutes ago, CircleSeven said:

And Big Bump.

 

Gray has now filed that lawsuit to the 11th Circuit over that fine.

 

As I understand it, the FCC's mandate is pretty broad. If it doesn't think that warehousing network affiliations is in the public interest, as long as it involves a TV signal, it can stop a sale. As we have seen in other parts of the media, warehousing properties usually results in an inferior product for the end consumer.

I hate to sound like a lefty, but you can see what's going on out there. Laissez-faire and libertarianism has its limits. 

Comcast announces $20 streaming service ‘NOW TV’ with Peacock included

Article:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/24/comcast-now-tv-streaming-service-with-peacock-included/

Press Release:

https://corporate.comcast.com/press/releases/comcast-introduces-now-tv

 .

3 hours ago, weather8822 said:

That didn’t take long. Byron Allen is already saying he’s interested in TEGNA. 

I'm interested in them too. I'll buy them.

Talk is cheap. 

10 hours ago, Yankees4life said:

Don't forget WDKY

Sinclair obviously saw its stations as being more lucrative than the Tribune stations, or it would have gotten rid of them and completed the Tribune transaction.

1 hour ago, weather8822 said:

I’m not so sure. Even a simple transaction may draw the ire of the FCC after how Sinclair behaved during their Tribune acquisition attempt. Also, Sinclair is up against the national cap now (assuming that the current FCC will not be using the UHF discount anymore). 

You guys make too much of this. The FCC has to follow the law as much as Sinclair did. They're not allowed to hold a grudge like people do. If Sinclair proposes a straight-up transaction that doesn't use a bunch of shell companies to get around the cap, they should be able to get a purchase through. In the Tribune purchase, Sinclair was doing all kinds of crazy things and FCC wasn't willing to let them go that far with the law. But as you can see with the latest purchased by Mission, the FCC isn't going to stop people from using sidecars. Assuming it gets approved, of course.

47 minutes ago, weather8822 said:

Honestly I don’t think Soo Kim/Standard will ever be selected as the winning bidders of a station group again. Just like after the Sinclair-Tribune deal died in a similar fashion, Sinclair has not been able to buy any full power stations since because no one will sell to them. 
 

Prospective sellers don’t want to sell their stations to a group that has a poor track record of getting deals done. In the bidding process companies often look at everything especially: 

 

-Who offers the most

-Who is most likely to get the deal across the finish line

 

I don't think Sinclair has been in the market to buy anything since they bought the sports networks. That may change now that the sports networks are off their plate. 

If it's a simple transaction, sellers aren't going to be skeptical of Sinclair. If Sinclair is going to pay the most money, that's who will get it. But I agree that a complicated deal that involves the kinds of legal contortions Sinclair has been famous for, is going to have skeptical sellers. 

7 hours ago, CircleSeven said:

If I remember from Sinclair-Tribune, Tribune announced the termination of that sale the day after the outside date (and of course filing that lawsuit). 

 

All that wasteful time trying to convince the FCC to change their minds and rescind that HDO, what Soo should have done was to go to the [incumbent] Tegna board and beg them not to sue him for all this waste of time.

 

If you don't hear anything today, you'll definitely hear something tomorrow.

 

 

I have no irons in this fire other than having Tegna in my market and not wanting to see that station fall into the hands of some third rate bankster-run broadcaster, but I literally dislike this Soo guy more and more, each time I see his picture. It's not because he's Asian, it's because he's a bankster and because of that smarmy look on his face.

It's May 22nd. We should know by the end of the day.

He's just blowing smoke. Again.

The FCC isn't going to reopen the door on this. They made their decision. It's going to the judge.

7 minutes ago, TheRob said:

Exec. 1: We're losing viewers to games and TikTok and YouTube.

 

Exec 2: I have an idea. Let's make access to our product more complicated and more expensive.

That's my big beef, all these controls. Media should be available everywhere. Over the air, TV, internet, phone and whatever else gets invented. It's like the corner gas station. You make it convenient for people. These people still have the mindset where they have to control access to everything. Unless you're in the first year or so of a Blockbuster movie, there's nothing really that valuable to control.

The only encryption they should have is they should encrypt something in there to play a reasonable number of commercials if you want to watch their product. If you don't want to watch the commercials, you don't get to watch the show. That's fair.

The rest of this is crap.

I'm getting sick of all this crap. For 50 years they've been fighting convenience, and that's one of the big reasons they are fading into irrelevancy. 

This article talks more about Comcast, but if you Google it, more and more of these TV chains are encrypting and the encryption is not playing well with people's tuners and OTA DVRs.

https://cordcuttersnews.com/comcast-is-starting-to-encrypt-its-free-over-the-atsc-3-0-tv-stations-meaning-many-cord-cutters-cant-watch-free-local-tv-anymore-without-upgrade/?amp=1

5 hours ago, NowBergen said:

Nexstar does not have the WLWC calls. They had only bought the programing assets of the then CW station in Providence/New Bedford.  The former ION kept the calls and operated the staton as Ion2. It is  now owned by Inyo.

Inyo, though not a sidecar, is operated by parties friendly to Scripps if I remember correctly. It's not like they have a lot invested in identity that they couldn't give up those call letters. Like CBS using WWJ in Detroit, just a way to get attention. 

Likewise in Indianapolis. I would put the WLWI call letters on the ion station there, which I think they own but I'm too lazy to look up. Then I'd start running all kinds of old Avco things maybe once a month. Not that anybody would watch them (I doubt many would), but people do have fond memories of those shows. You could still build a great marketing campaign around those shows to build awareness of your station.

David Letterman doing the TOH announcement, "That's right kids, I used to do the weather on WLWI, Indianapolis, now Channel 63."

On 5/4/2023 at 4:56 PM, mrschimpf said:

And that answers the question about why KMCC hasn't gotten rid of those old calls for KINV or something like that since the Scripps purchase. The Golden Knights are the true local and homegrown team, so this is nothing but good news for Scripps and viewers; within the ATTRM territory, SLC, Montana and Boise have Scripps stations to spare, and it won't be hard to find a Reno affiliate (Wyoming may be an issue because that market is a complete mess of distant uncaring owners outside of Gray, though there for not of lack of trying).

It's corporate malpractice not to bring the WLWC call letters to Columbus. You can design an entire marketing campaign around that to give your station some recognition instead of just some station on autopilot. They're based in Cincinnati so you'd think they'd have some kind of an appreciation of the way you could market using that heritage, but they don't have a very good track record. They seem to always screw up their businesses.