mrschimpf

At least they're seeking a local met there too. But it looks like even with Nexstar behind it (and its O&O past, even as a satellite), going by Twitter, CBS just had enough of WJMN's major issues during their programming and wanted a station in Marquette itself again; the issues with its news department we've talked about here before certainly did not help. For WZMQ/Lilly though, if this is all true...it's a major vindication for them, as they built a station up from the literal ashes Equity left behind in their bankruptcy, helped by the Green Bay ownership that got things right before they sold it off.

They currently have weather segments daily done by the WICU/WSEE mets in Erie.

Tried out https://www.cbsmarquette.com. Redirects to WZMQ's website. It was created around noontime, just today. They used privacy tools to obscure who registered it, outside the usual Tucows anonymization address in Toronto.

Looks like a mix of MyNetworkTV and Antenna TV/Rewind TV. I'm wondering if Lily was able to grab the CBS affiliation for WZMQ as part of their regular CBS renewal for WSEE and WENY-DT2. And...I really don't expect that news department to last much longer. No more morning news and just two hours, 6 and 10 on weekdays? That would be a 'why bother' opportunity for most candidates.

From WSAZ this evening; presented without comment outside I hope she is OK once the adrenaline wears off.

Anyone see any signs or promotion of the planned O&O subchannel launches? I expected the switch at least by 1/3, but WITI still has Antenna TV (and picked up HSN OTA on a new subchannel because free $$$), and I don't see that any other FTS stations have done it...maybe they pushed it because of the current staffing situation?

Channel 15 is shared with land mobile radios and hospital radiology equipment, and because of that they have the lowest full-power signal in the market.

I wish I could assume spin-offs here, but knowing how Tegna has played with things in each market in the past, it's possible under Standard that Sinclair-style 'subchannel mergers' will see WATL-DT1 moved to WXIA-DT2 and WJAX-DT1 being DT2'ed onto WFOX, leaving subchannel network farm husks behind, along with the WFAA and KHOU moves onto their sister UHFs being executed to take advantage of the UHF discount (a major Biden disappointment; it needed to be taken care of at 12:01 p.m. 1/20 last year, along with appropriate FCC nominees). They've started to become more common after being tested out on MyNet/CW stations with no provider, regulatory or consumer pushback, Sinclair barely had any notice of their Fox moves from the shell/sidecar stations last year, and I'm afraid it'll become standard (no pun intended) as time goes on.

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day, so Fox has started a new tradition of HBCU college basketball games on this day, which is definitely laudable. So it's a nationwide pre-emption. Gus Johnson was going to call tomorrow's Notre Dame/Howard game, but Tim Brando mentioned on today's game after Philly/TB that he's ill (no mention of COVID or just something else). Howard is his alma mater (and this is actually a re-try from 2021, which saw it cancelled), so he must be gutted to not be there tomorrow.

Nah, by broadening their umbrella beyond E/I, they're hedging that there's still schedule gaps on the weekends; eventually the E/I facade will die, but then they have hours and hours of programming appealing to older audiences that just needs the literal E/I Band-Aid ripped off the screen to fill the time on stations that don't have an NFL game. Even the trades have long acknowledged no one over the age of 5 or under 50 is learning a thing from these shows or watching them seriously. It's a conveyance to offer products to seniors, and fills three hours that would otherwise go to news, infomercials, or much worse syndicated dregs (Allen Media, Associated Television, Telco, or A&E reality shows you already see on A&E).

MLBN/NHL is in the former MSNBC space in Secaucus in the Hartz Mountain development, where the WWOR studios once were. Fort Lee is up the road by the George Washington Bridge. 6A is also a possibility for WNJU (the old Megan Kelly space), which has been used by The Tonight Show and its Peacock kid's version since then.

As the 'inventor' of the Ring doorbell is a completely known promotionalist (it was a Shark Tank project) to the point of exhaustion, I can believe he only sold it to MGM as a daily strip. The guy goes to extremes to market it, including free devices to homes that install it and let the police know.

With NATPE in Miami cancelled in-person, announcements are starting to come out about next year. First up, MGM, with one great idea and one which makes you question why creatives exist when suits just find the lowest common denominator; Teen Court...yes, a very good idea as it seems that adults forget that their kids have to suffer through court shows that seem to be taking on more adult issues as time goes on. It'll be nice to have a show that's designed for the afterschool crowd and has regular old teen disputes, plus teen 'judges' with 'Jersey attitude' (never a bad thing to have on TV). Should be a good one. Ring Nation...really?!?! MGM is doing five days a week out of this?! We already get enough viral home cam video from local news, RightThisMinute and innumerable magazine shows. Is someone really going to watch 22 minutes of mainly black-and-white nightvision footage of crimes, car accidents and FedEx drivers slipping on ice, and marriage proposals (!?) that basically comes down to 'Amazon Presents: Stretching the terms of service for your doorbell camera to absurd extremes and not paying your users for use of footage'? They're competing with YouTube channels with doorbell footage; never a good sign. And makes me glad I use Nest and Wyze instead. Also...Divorce Court continues to never die, with Star Jones taking the bench after a two-year run with Faith Jenkins. I expect her run on the show, like everything involving The View, to be completely drama free and she'll never appear in the tabloids regarding backstage drama.

The same with ABC; the window where they could have fled KDNL for anywhere else in St. Louis is officially closed. They don't renew that empty shell of a station, they simply end their relationship with that network. The era where the networks were able to strong-arm affiliates for proper terms/programming quality has passed. Also, NBC is stuck on the third or fourth place station in many of those Sinclair markets, and the few high-placing stations they do have are from old owners who never wanted anything to do with SBG but ended up with them under sketchy circumstances.

If most of these stations and the CW+'ers are sister stations of a Big Four station, the worst thing they could do is dilution of something you can already see on multiple other networks to the point of tossing the remote and choosing Netflix instead. The WB, UPN and CW actually thrive(d) on all-hands-on-deck election nights where they're an option with fictional programming, especially for someone who either doesn't care about elections completely, there's no real races of notice in their state or locality, or would rather wait to get the numbers nicely-counted a day later than in a horserace up-to-the-minute mode with Squash-o-Vision ruining their show.

They'll keep that at least a year or two before turning it into a redirect; you don't want a rebrand messed up by a fake news website (say, "queenscitynews.com") looking to solve your belly-fat issues or clean out your colon, plus there's the 'backlink' problem where you want to keep older Facebook and Twitter links to stories working. Also as discussed before, queencitynews.com still held by a ghost site in Helena, Montana. There could be issues trying to get a hold of that person, and their WHOIS may be massively incorrect after 16 years; the only time they may remember their website even exists these days comes at credit card expiration time. I am relieved that they seemed to hear the feedback about 'what about news outside Charlotte?' concern with the branding, by appending 'Carolina's Own' naturally into the slogan.

Actually it's the original version; been there for years. I do like the modern touch of merging in the 'A' and waveline in the new variation.

I just read about this story where a former Pappas station in Columbus owned by CNZ added a distributed transmitter to get their subchannel farm station into the Atlanta market (CNZ did the same with WIWN in Milwaukee). It does make me wonder if Gray is doing the same; buying up these stations to be extended nodes in an ad-hoc DTT network to move those no-hope licenses (usually from Edge Spectrum, ARK, and HC2) and eventually super-serve a larger market. Especially with ATSC 3.0 coming, it seems like they want to take no chances with presumed broadcast range like they did on ATSC 1.0 and the failed mobile standard.

The Press radio stations, Newsmax and NTD/Falun Gong were dropped at the start of the year already (Newsmax would've been gone no matter what because of their rise on cable and just stopping that free carriage model). Scripps networks should be going pretty soon since WPXN and WFTY already carry them, and the Get After It/Luken trash will be gone ASAP. As for WZME still carrying Sonlife, that org loves to get long-term deals so it's going to be awhile before that's gone (and Weigel seems to be okay with other networks as long as they don't compete in their own spaces. I do assume though that Wiegel will honor their existing deals with WCBS and Fox in the market in full, like they've done in Denver.

I still remember when Pax tried to go it alone as "i" without any studio partners...it took at least eight years to undo the damage from that "i for infomercial' era pre-Ion where they had one original production that was gone after eight weeks. In 2022, the last thing broadcast needs is another older-centric network where they only take the 'safe' Associated Television "World's Cheapest Viral Video We Could License" filler on the CW that's the lowest in every weekly ratings report or just grab everything cheap Canadian networks offer. If Nexstar (or God forbid, Sinclair) buys the majority stake in the network, they both need guaranteed studio partners and high-profile programming, because slumming it only imperils both their entire affiliate base, and independent/MyNetworkTV stations in general. There's also The CW+ to consider in this deal; you still have to market a full 168 hours per week to your smaller market affiliates along with those existing syndication deals, and the other station groups will simply walk away if you switch that to "NewsNation Annex" or "The National Desk+" outside network hours or worse, get an anti-trust case slapped on you because you swipe it from other station groups wholesale for your own. This isn't ditching MeTV for Antenna TV because it's in-house, but something that needs to be navigated with care. Also...in before anyone else goes 'finally they can restore cartoons to broadcast TV and ditch the E/I block'...no, nothing will change there no matter who buys it. Litton/Hearst will throw money at whoever buys out the network to keep the E/I deal for One Magnificent Morning and its elderly demo happy, along with their monopoly on the market, plus Hearst has CW affiliates so they have that leverage on the new owner.

The same rumors have been floating around since even before 45 announced his candidacy (and the BTS issues have been public for years already but only cared about by the worst of cable news obsessives that aren't on this board). Until anything actually happens on this, it's still 100% skepticism they'll do anything outside a natural letting go at the end of her latest deal (or seeing if the show fits better on streaming).

Well that would be a complete 180º; I still remember when Nexstar killed Hollywood Today Live the moment the approval for Media General came because Perry thought it was a distraction from their 'local first' initiative.

A possibility is launching HD affiliates of Circle, since that's an area it would do very well in; no current affiliate of the network is on the three major stations there. Could see that and since they lost NBCSN, they might ramp up PowerNation as a subchannel network so they don't have to keep playing musical chairs as cable networks wind down.

I say it because internationally, Disney Channel, XD and Junior have gone dark to focus more on Disney+, where they don't have to share any revenue with pay-TV providers. The US and Canada might be different, true...but the children's market for traditional cable channels is declining, and Disney's new programming on those three networks exclusively without D+ sharing has completely declined. I would not be shocked to see the networks wind down before the end of 2025. Eventually, that same 'secret sauce' will be found for the major sports networks. Not anytime soon (as we see with Bally and had it not been cancelled, the Arizona Barstool Bowl), but Dish is done with RSNs, and with ESPN Classic gone, now ESPNU and ESPNews are the focus of networks to be reeled back for ESPN+ coverage instead.

I thought of it more as NBCSN merging with USA, and USA being the brand that got to keep going on. NBC Sports no longer needs to buy filler like Mecum or PowerNation and fill 168 hours minus infomercials in a week, while the USA side gets to reduce the films and series they have to air on the weekends for live content they desperately need as their repeat shows can easily be streamed, without commercials. Frankly I want more of this; network mergers to remove pointless networks and 'bundle bloat' that have no reason to exist when their programming can easily do so on another channel space. NBCU has embraced this in the past by killing Trio, Cloo, Chiller and Esquire and with eventually do so with Universal Kids (now just a literal YouTube playlist with traditional commercials), and slowly Disney has by also taking out ESPN Classic and likely soon Disney Channel and XD (thanks, Disney+)...while ViacomCBS continues to go on thinking viewers need VH1, which hasn't shown a Video Hit since 2013, along with Logo, MTV2, BET Her and TV Land, which are all just rerun channels with different audiences, and that Nicktoons and NickMusic need to somehow still exist.