DirtyHarry

I think you guys are on to something about Atlanta. If you go to their website, not a single mention of CBS that I can see, at least not on the home page.

https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com

Titan TV (through their website) shows the ANF Logo and not CBS.

1. I love talent with great/interesting voices. Everybody sounds like high school kids these days! Love interesting talent like Milton Lewis. Lively, entertaining--nothing wrong with that whatsoever. Why bore people to death with a bunch of milquetoast stiffs? It's the local news. It's not really as serious as some people pretend it should be.

2. Wow, a demonstration that actually looks like it could be organic. Can't remember the last time I saw something like that on TV. Now it's predominantly all rent-a-mobs.

3. With the Atlanta rumors, maybe they should have held on to some of those CW stations they previously divested. Like Providence, Columbus and Indianapolis. CBS News Providence? CBS News Indianapolis?

Right now, the main advantage I see with free streaming is that the picture quality is generally better than OTA. The main OTA Channel may look good, but subchannels tend to be fuzzier. ATSC 3.0 is supposed to alleviate that. If that's what ends up happening, I don't really see what you need cable TV for. Just program the sub channels better and put everything up on there and make it easy for people.

1 hour ago, TheFizzle21 said:

There was a point in time in 2018 or 2019 that I thought to myself and realized....there's hardly any scripted TV shows on television that people want to see, mainly because, as someone alluded to earlier, these companies put their money where their mouths are, and that's with the streaming services. I mean...is it safe to say all these big 4 networks have outside of reality, news, and sports are their legacy shows? NBC with their Law & Order trifecta...ABC and Grey's Anatomy...CBS continuing on with NCIS after all this time....Fox with two Sunday night animated comedies in Family Guy and The Simpsons, I guess? One thing's for sure, nobody I know is flocking to the TV for the newest ABC drama or CBS' next big comedy led by a well-known actor. This leads me into my next point.

 

Appointment television. I miss the hell out of it, or at least what comes with it. When I used to watch Chuck on NBC, I had quite a number of days where I'd hop on Twitter and follow along with everyone watching the show at the same time. I did this with a few other shows and a quite often once I found subreddits in Reddit for my favorite shows. That level of camaraderie is something you can't replicate with a Netflix or Disney+ show that rolls out new episodes at 3am on a Wednesday or Friday. While this isn't going to take away from whether or not people enjoy a series, appointment TV is something that'll rarely be seen, or at least not in the droves that it would lead to if you had to tune into a show at 8 or try and watch a DVR recording a week before the next episode.

They can stream all they want, but they're never going to get me. And to be honest, I don't really miss anything they're not offering anymore enough to pay. Pretty stupid and shortsighted to give up the biggest platform they have. If anything, they should augment it with social media, sending texts, reminding people to go into their TV set to watch a show.

I use the free streaming plenty, so I'm not just some old guy who refuses to try something new. I just think the free OTA platform is easiest and most convenient for people. I pay for the local newspaper and the Wall Street Journal. Anything else I have to pay for, I can live without.

YIKES!

So, at 5:00 p.m. out of 50,000 adults, 13,000 of them are age 25 to 54. That means 37,000 of them are old geezers (as consumer spenders, that is).

At 6:00 p.m., out of 67,000 people, 17,000 are age 25 to 54. The remaining 50,000 are old geezers.

Yikes again!

1 hour ago, Georgie56 said:

The entire 7pm streaming hour today was a WGPR/WKBD reunion, with Amyre Jr. interviewing her mother and former director Ken Bryant.

 

 

Is the mother white or black? Her dialect is kind of black but she doesn't really look it at all. Just curious, no ill intent.

19 hours ago, Weeters said:

I think it's necessary to reference @Myron Falwell's post from the KCAL thread as it's extremely relevant to the ongoing channel number discussion. Long story short, look at Birmingham's WBMA, which brands as "ABC 33/40". It has not transmitted on the Channel 33 satellite since 2014, and is now regulated to the .2 on 40. WBMA's own low-power signal was on 58, which is also what their Virtual Channel is, but they didn't brand with any mention of 58 at all. What they do have is this mess, none of which have anything to do with the 33 in their brand, and 

 

 

 

And yet everyone still figures out where to watch James Spann when there's a tornado.

 

In the words of one of our favorite media bloggers: JUST SAYING...

 

 

Playing devil's advocate, maybe that's why they wanted to keep virtual channel 3 so badly in Las Vegas!

4 hours ago, CLETVFan said:

When did Fox move from WTTE to WSYX 6.3?

Enough time has passed. Time for Fox 28 to become Fox 6, unless they plan on returning to 28 at some point.

My theory was that they were trying to jam TBD down the throats of cable companies by forcing it as 28.1. Or maybe this all has to do with all the shuffling around that had to occur for 3.0 since both ABC and Fox are at 720p. Maybe it just made more sense bandwidth wise to have them on the WSYX signal.

Gray has CBS, NBC and CW; Hubbard own ABC and My TV in that market so I don't know what the problem is. Forum owns the newspaper and the industry is dying. If anything, this would help the newspaper survive.

By the way, I was watching Distro Tv just to see what they had. I saw WDIO on the choice of channels and decided to watch their news.

Their main anchor guy is great. Middle-aged guy, obviously experienced in the market. He is larger-market material (larger than Duluth, that is). The sports kid on tonight was also pretty good. He's going to have a good career. The female sports director was out covering a dog race and she didn't seem too bad, either.

The weather chick was okay, but she sounded like she was reading cue cards. She's been there a year and a half. You would think she'd be more natural by now. Also two black chicks that were reporters, talk about fish out of water. (In Duluth?) They both seemed nice enough, but they're both mush mouths. I hope they get better. They need to give all three of them elocution lessons.

I always loved watching small market TV. Newscast overall was pretty good. Interesting enough and watchable.

I was working in my office late yesterday and I had the CBS News Channel (formerly CBSN) streaming in the background. Except for the diversity propaganda they were pushing, I was surprised how watchable it was. 

I used to watch ABC a lot back in the David Brinkley days, but they are unbearable today. Then I used to watch Fox News a lot, but I don't have cable anymore and even though it's still comes through the wire, news with a neocon slant just doesn't interest me.

So I thought I'd ask you all who you like the best. I find myself tuning into CBS News the most and that kind of surprises me. I question some of their talent decisions, but I think they are the most balanced and watchable these days.

Their building was for sale several years ago as a sale-leaseback. I always wondered if they wanted to stay there long-term or were looking for an exit strategy so they could move somewhere else. That probably also explains the 20-year-old set. Why update if you are looking for a way to get out of the building?

6 hours ago, tyrannical bastard said:

WWHO is the 3.0 station for the Columbus market.  All they would have to do to keep the other subchannels status quo is switch 53.1 to something else.

 

Since 3.0 is such a coordinated effort between broadcasters (especially Sinclair & Nexstar), there has to be a level of cooperation and sharing.  Nexstar taking away the CW from others may be a problem, but they still would have to "make nice" with Sinclair because of all of the hosting and sharing of channels.

 

I"m surprised the FCC hasn't chimed in on how a station like WWHO could be exempt from ownership limits since it is a host station and that their originating program streams are effectively digital subchannels on other stations in the market.

I think next Nexstar and Sinclair cooperate with each other in general. I know Nexstar runs a Sinclair station somewhere in Illinois I believe. And Nexstar has owned Antenna TV and this TV for now how long now? They are still both on Sinclair signals. They seem to have a you scratch my back I scratch yours relationship.

I was watching Bounce last night and just curious about the logistics. Right on the money, "WSFJ-TV, LONDON, OHIO" appears at the top of the hour. I'm assuming that it is hubbed somewhere? Do they hub it here in Ohio or with the other ION stations?

First of all, why isn't anybody smart enough to type "LONDON - COLUMBUS" into the computer?

Second, I'm curious why they picked London as their city of license. It was Newark before, and that's about 50 miles away on the other side of Columbus.

Also, they channel-share with an LPTV station. That adds another link in the chain that could possibly break. Who monitors that?

Do they have to have a local presence anymore? Like an office or a studio somewhere in town?

Do they have local public service requirements they have to meet anymore?

And if they were smart, just as a marketing gimmick, they would bring back the WLWC call letters. I'm sure they'll just keep running this on autopilot, but if they ever do want to turn this into a real TV station, you might be able to get noticed in the market that way (like WWJ). WSFJ stands for "Winning Souls for Jesus." I wonder if anybody at Scripps even realizes that.

One more thing. I have four TVs in my house and none of them are smart tvs. One has a Roku box, another one is a small kitchen TV, and two tube tvs, one in the office and one in my garage. Three of those four TVs are exclusively OTA.

15 minutes ago, nycnewsjunkie said:

I think it’s safe to say that CBS Detroit falls into the “fewer legacy viewers at risk” category. Not only is channel 62 hard to get to for OTA viewers; that station (in its current form) doesn’t have much of a legacy to speak of.

 

I generally agree, but it depends on how much CBS is invested in attracting OTA viewers in Detroit. Moving their virtual channel would only impact people who don’t have cable or streaming. I’m not sure if the number of antenna-only viewers in the Detroit viewing area would make that a big enough concern. Plus, CBS is putting a big emphasis on their streaming news networks anyway, so their Detroit OTA channel probably isn’t their highest priority right now.

I don't know what OTA viewership is now percentage-wise. I know cable penetration is way down. I'm sure some of that has gone to OTT, but you would have to think that OTA viewership has also grown.

Look at it this way, Detroit has something like 1.9 million households in its DMA, not counting Canada, Toledo, Flint, Cleveland and wherever Detroit signals go. The old number was 10% for OTA and it has to be a minimum of 20% these days. That's a market of almost 400,000 people. That's comparable to Charleston-Huntington and Omaha. Yes, I would say that's important.

1 hour ago, sfomspphl said:

Lots of puts and takes unique to each station and market not all of them related to digital program guides.

My take is that it's real estate and you have to make it easy for your customer to find you, just like any other consumer driven business. I realize that viewers aren't the real customers in media, but media still depends on attracting eyeballs.

I don't know if this is just people blowing smoke, but it makes sense. My understanding was that NBC bought Outlet because they were trying to figure out if they could move WJAR to Boston. They didn't care about any of the other stations. Once they figured out they wouldn't be able to move WJAR, they sold.

19 minutes ago, tyrannical bastard said:

The irony in that is that WTTE was their second station outside of Baltimore.  They "sold" it to Glencairn/Cunningham right after Sinclair bought River City (and WSYX).

To stay a step ahead of the FCC (and likely the DOJ), they moved "FOX 28' over to WSYX and made Cunningham's station a truly independent operation with no Sinclair programming at all.

 

In a way, Sinclair's growth in Columbus has stayed constant and grown a little, while WCMH and WBNS tanked under their corporate regimes.  WCMH"s damage was under Media General and the destruction of WBNS was largely at Tegna's behest after DECADES of local ownership under Dispatch.

I don't think Media General was so bad. They had financial problems but their on air product was respectable, and they still treated WCMH and WFLA like their flagships. Outlet was a great owner. Everybody says the NBC years were good, but I wasn't a fan. When you're too cheap to build a new news set and have to get one second hand from Louisville, that's pretty shoddy. Likewise with their cameras. I think I remember them bragging about new cameras they were getting being used models from Rockefeller Center. LOL

And furthermore, I can't think of any place other than Louisville, Birmingham and maybe Chicago where a UHF station has been able to drag itself out of the cellar it has VHF competition. By and large, low channel numbers are the most successful.

6 hours ago, Bsean said:

I agree

What's not to understand? Cable TV used to have 90% penetration, now it's 50%. That means people are using good old-fashioned channel numbers. What's so hard to understand about making it easy for people to see you and get to you, instead of having to sort through a bunch of Mexican, home shopping and preacher channels to get to you all the way up where all the crappy TV stations are on the high end of the dial. What's so hard to understand that people like using channel up and channel down buttons to flip through TV channels but that their patience isn't endless? (Try flipping through a couple of those LPTVs with 12 sub channels of crap all fired up.)

Finally, what's so hard to understand that by and large TV stations with VHF Channel numbers get better ratings than people with UHF Channel numbers? Programmers fight to get low channel numbers on cable, Sinclair fought to keep their low channel in Las Vegas, Block jumped through a few legal hoops so they could be Channel 8 in Lima, too, NBC tried to get the lowest channel number it could in Boston. If it didn't matter, people wouldn't be going through all this effort.

37 minutes ago, Breaking News said:

WSYX should of pony up those dollars for her to stay.

Why when they are number one without her? 

Columbus was the second or third market Sinclair was in and they still treat it like a flagship. Next best thing to local ownership is a big corporate owner that hasn't forgotten its roots.

1 minute ago, tyrannical bastard said:

On the other hand, WSYX is the crown jewel in Sinclair's fold, probably even more so than their flagship, WBFF in Baltimore.

Yeah, but now they have stations like KOMO and WJLA, so I am very surprised that it retains crown jewel status. My theory has always been that Columbus is a profitable Market because there are few overlapping signals that eat away at their viewership. That's been good for us. Even far-away corporate ownership has treated these stations well over the years.

4 minutes ago, tyrannical bastard said:

South Bend (WSBT) originates news for both WNWO in Toledo and WOLF in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton with the SAME ANCHORS.

Oh, okay. I knew they were the WOLF anchors, but I thought they were based in PA.

12 minutes ago, mrschimpf said:

Since they added WDJT to my cable system, it's been just either '9' or '605' in the Roledex of my mind so I knew where to tune, and now it's just 'CBS 58' because that's what they've been every day since December 1994 and never changed the branding. Their first priority was to get established, then build a news division; on that front they've been very successful and now you nearly forget that CBS bounced around 6, 12 and 18 for so many decades, and they've got a good syndicated schedule.

 

Meanwhile, WWJ has just...kinda existed. They just pass through CBS-owned content in syndication and outside of a few Lions games here and there and watching CBS, there's really been nothing to keep you there because 2, 4 and 7 are always there in their niches. Same when they purchased WKBD and made it just another bland UPN/CW station. And it's either 62 CBS, CBS Detroit, CBS, WWJ, CBS 62...never any consistent branding. And it didn't help that CBSNS had old guard management at the Westinghouse stations that wasn't changing a thing any time soon, or dysfunctional idiots with battling egos who bought stations to get into a golf club, and in Detroit, just never really tried.

 

Still ended up a better result than getting WADL as an affiliate, though; that entire station is a headache and a half as it is now. Imagine having to fight them every few years on affiliation terms.

Of course, you have to have the product to back up the channel number. If you have a crappy product, channel number isn't going to help you But don't discount how helpful it would be, either. Especially if you have a crappy brand like Channel 62. It's like having a shop at a good mall, versus the plaza down the street.

1 hour ago, ColumbusNewsFan said:

Plus when you have 2,3,4 and 7 as your big 4 just in a short turn... it works out for the viewer and CBS as well. It get rid of your 62 problem and also solves a major issue CBS has in that market in Detroit: Visibility of your product. It's literally the Boston NBC 10 situation but in a situation where it makes perfect sense for them to do it in this case and it is a gain for everyone. 

 

Sinclair thought it was important enough to petition the FCC to let them keep virtual Channel 3 for whatever signal they ended up being on in Las Vegas. I think CBS could probably make the same case and just buy the virtual channel number from whoever has that channel 3 signal. Or buy the station, take the channel number and then sell it back to whoever owns it. Lots of ways to skin this cat.

16 minutes ago, ColumbusNewsFan said:

Plus when you have 2,3,4 and 7 as your big 4 just in a short turn... it works out for the viewer and CBS as well. It get rid of your 62 problem and also solves a major issue CBS has in that market in Detroit: Visibility of your product. It's literally the Boston NBC 10 situation but in a situation where it makes perfect sense for them to do it in this case and it is a gain for everyone. 

 

15 isn't too bad of a number. You're still in the general vicinity of everybody else with 4 and 5 (and 25). But Channel numbers like 46 and 62 are problematic IMO, from the standpoint of making it easier for the viewer.

16 minutes ago, 24994J said:

For the record, it appears that CBS Detroit is found on at least one cable provider slotted at channel 6. It's not up at 62 for everyone.

Right, but we're talking about OTA here as well as branding.

Think of it this way: you're sitting in your Laz-Z-Boy watching whatever channel. You're bored of it and you start flipping through other channels. Think of all the crap out there you have to flip through, all the infomercials, all the Mexican channels, all the preacher creatures, all the diginets and all the LPTVs with crap programming. And don't forget Canadian TV! Wouldn't it be nice to have good real estate right next to Fox and NBC? Wouldn't it be nice to just have to punch the number "3" on your remote to get to CBS?