mrschimpf

There's no way this goes further than a few months. Some of these stations have been carrying double-blocks of The Simpsons, Friends, Family Guy, and Seinfeld in these timeslots since the minute they went into syndication, and have been dealing with MNTV becoming nothing and The CW now being out-rated by the Spanish nets and Ion. I know that the first-run sitcom market is beyond anemic at this point, but risking the last steady local ratings for a national newscast likely to be ignored feels like such a dangerous risk to take, especially in markets where SBG doesn't have a sister Big Four station.

I'm still waiting for Roku to settle their tantrum with Spectrum that resulted in their app being removed (though it has stayed on for subscribers who haven't hit 'delete' yet, so I have to be very careful when I need to organize my Roku screen). More and more, I'm glad I decided to go with Apple TV and Chromecast as my main stream boxes.

I know Focus on the Family has their radio commentaries...but I never knew they did offer their TV commentaries to anyone to air outside religious stations and WBKB took them!

If you go back to a certain point on WFLD's Wikipedia page before they banned lists of 'non-notable' employees (here, anyone without an article), you might be able to look up folks; hope this link might help you out.

I agree with the blackouts for sure; I don't really need to see them in these types of videos unless they're from before 1990. This is why sports YouTubers like HighlightHeaven, Jomboy and UrinatingTree do a whole lotta sponsorships and give up on monetization rather than play the YouTube 'flip it around, reduce the video window, or zoom in' game you see with cartoon clips and kids shows that somehow get on there. They figure just give the money to the leagues, then make their money other ways. But for news clips, it's just a smaller audience of us overall that's not worth the hassle. I got guff when I uploaded an 'angry sportscaster rant' clip from a TV station way back in 2007 and just decided to cut a Cubs/Brewers highlight out because it was unimportant to the context of the clip. Never been taken down, never been MLB-monetized. It's worth the effort to get rid of the clips.

I understand the building is an albatross, but...wouldn't you just let the real estate side of the business handle it and just keep the move going? Is a real estate transaction in Denver such a big deal for Scripps, they would be bankrupted, give up the ABC affiliation, shut down their news division, and become a Katz subchannel farm if they couldn't sell one building? Also the tone of this from the GM...nobody in the news and old entertainment divisions of the stations designed or built it, and this basically sounds like he's mad at them for his 'collaboration' issues in 2021. Finally...get real. Outside the few folks who need to see the public file in person or come in for an interview, 'access' to a news studio is not paramount. They're probably going to lease a boring office building's middle floors nearby and nobody is ever going to visit them.

WTMJ has given the death sentence to their The NOW as of May 7. I think we're on concept seven now of trying to fill the shoes of Wheel of Fortune since September 2004, this time, it's Milwaukee Tonight (since they bombed with Wisconsin Tonight and can't re-use that trademark); basically what they tried at 3:30 after the second COVID wave until last month (all positive news), now moved to before primetime. With one of the former contributors of Real Milwaukee on WITI on this show, it confirms the cancellation of the latter.

WTMJ seems to have adjusted show opening graphics; instead of the 'one still picture or drone pan, slogans, then fade in to logo' they've had for the past year, it now features multiple images in the open, then the logo in the background with the show title up-front. Also noticing that they have several new chroma-key backgrounds for anchor stand-ups. ETA - The 5 p.m. open seems to be normal...it looks like the station is experimenting with a new 4 p.m. hour format with Tom Mustin co-anchoring NOW-like national stories from KMGH with local mentions of WTMJ for...some reason? Is this why they ditched the 3:30 show, to try this now?

Nationalized coverage has become standard with these types of stories on the Spectrum News networks; usually it's hosted out of either NY1 or the Washington bureau, and of course they do simulcasts of items such as the SOTU and press conferences depending on the local op's discretion.

Robert Feder's eulogy talking more about Davis's role in vitalizing WGN News in their superstation era.

Really, does it need to be phrased so negatively here? They're in my market and they could be a lot worse, like WGCL worse or WWJ-TV non-existent, and they have management which is willing to spend. And when WTMJ is in the market continuing to drag it down, I'd rather watch a great fourth-place news operation trying hard than a third-place one we know can do 250% better (and has). They got to 25 years; there were times we were praying they got to 10 or even five, so it's a major accomplishment to me.

I still remember locally that Liberty Media had a great website and streaming presence for WFRV...and it was gone the moment Nexstar closed on their deal. In 2021, their video presence is pretty much confined to a hard-to-find link on their website, and their live player is so janky, it's better to just adjust your location on Paramount+ if you pay for it, and stream WFRV that way. I still remember a few years back the WFRV social media guy arguing on Twitter with public @'s towards the holder of the (at)wfrv account who was willing to sell it to Nexstar at a reasonable price (yes, don't take the offer and just get legal to dot those I's and T's to get it)...and now the account is suspended, meaning Nexstar will likely have to pay a lot if they ever want to reduce their address down from the bulky (at)wfrvlocal5

Seems like a contractual requirement of the LMA agreement or to fulfill some well-hidden public affairs remit as part of their license. It seems likely Spectrum also isn't happy to be carrying a Dabl station with main-channel two-digit carriage and asked them to air something local on that station. WHAM seems the closest that makes any sense and they already provide weather segments.

If not a station purchase, as WMYO-CD has always tried to program for the Indiana side of the market (including an INN newscast in the late 2000s on their old sister station WWJS-CD), I could see them push for WISH simulcasts on their schedule. WBNA is also a possibility.

How do you not realize that placing a TV studio next to a major highway interchange for a coast-to-coast highway, especially in Texas, where 12-lane highways are always in planning, is a bad idea? Then decide to expand that building without a simple check with TxDOT to see if they plan to expand the road in the next decade? Talk about the ultimate in bad planning. I know there are stations along interstate or equivalent highways, but they're usually placed on stretches where an interchange isn't ever going to go (WGBA or WMTV) or far and overlooking it (WWLP, WVIT, WCVB), not where a 0-digit interstate changes from north to east and is forever being finessed to fix a curve.

Likely related to Columbus, Cedar Rapids and Dayton; WCHS is Sinclair, WVAH is Cunningham. Both are on UHF, so there's otherwise no technical reason for it.

They probably would have kept Ion Shop if it made them money too. You know somewhere in Scripps, there's someone who currently has a lot of regrets they didn't keep Shop at Home or the O&O stations that used to make up that network (along with viewers, since most went to the RNN infomercial/one talk show network or TCT).

I forgot another issue; Journal used to be really stingy with subchannels with Charter and Time Warner, so in a few places like ex-Charter markets, they've never had any subchannels on their systems, and Scripps hasn't corrected that oversight, so they're going into a situation in some markets where they have to deal with both Ion and Journal's negotiating errors restricting thier leverage to get the Katz networks on. My system only has Bounce TV from WMLW, and lost Grit when WCGV went off the air, so we're literally missing most of the suite in my market.

End of an era in Milwaukee...master control for WTMJ/WGBA/WACY is now at WRTV in Indy (and KMTV in Omaha is now out of WTKR/Norfolk). With the Good Karma Radio stations beginning to plan a move downtown and no more HQ uses, Radio City is going to have the reverse problem from KMGH...too much room, but the space gained is likely way too small for personnel and television studio uses.

I pity the poor cable companies tomorrow that have to either take 'why am I not getting (new network) that just popped up on Ion' because of their painful dependence on must-carry agreements on the main channel, having three of the same network on because Ion plopped Ion Life on a main channel in the market that used to be TBN/CW/some other network, or missing channels because you know there will be a station carrying a Katz subchannel that'll be like 'well (bleep) you too' and throw it off their lineup in spite the moment the clock strikes 6 tomorrow morning. Milwaukee's situation is such a mess with the Katz networks spread among WTMJ, WMLW and WPXE, and Green Bay the same with WGBA, WACY, WFRV, along with existing coverage of Ion on WBAY that you know will be gone soon to create another Ion/MyNet Frankenstein lineup on WACY.

Spectrum News 1 was really the only other choice as a statewide cable network, and that came with the handicap that it would only be on Spectrum, so the Brewers really had no choice. And going with Weigel would've meant re-stringing together a disparate network of broadcast stations which outside of WMLW, would've been likely a bunch of subchannels already in flux with the Quincy deal and minus Sinclair stations. The Brewers already saw what a disaster Victory Sports One was for the Twins; there was no way they'd launch a one-team RSN in 2021.

The Brewers are sticking with Bally Sports Wisconsin on a multi-year agreement (though how many years hasn't been announced). No on-air changes to personnel. The Marlins remain up in the air with a 2021 TV deal with BS Florida/Sun.

I still remember the days where we had to have a box because our city's build out had "A" and "B" lines which required an A/B switch and made recording from a VCR a guessing game (I went on a vacation hoping I recorded the ALF finale movie on ABC on the A side...only to come home to two hours of Saturday night CNBC on the B side). Despite that, we still had some split channels into the 90s until Charter bought our provider and implemented one-line service, then digital cable. And we didn't even get BET until 2012 locally. And in that time, we've lost channels because our city was classified as a Milwaukee market city, but Green Bay channels are also in our market, so as networks who don't care about decades-long relationships between viewer and stations, we lost the UPN/MyNet, CBS and Fox stations from Green Bay because of network greed. Thankfully streaming for most of them makes catching their news easy (except for Nexstar stations), but it's aggravating to pay so much a month for all this service and your provider doesn't want to deal with blackout hassles just to keep offering a Fox station from out-of-market, lest they lose Fox News next time because of bitterness on Rupert's end.

Not much of a loss from the $10 million Fox was going to buy it for in 2014 when they needed a backstop just in case they couldn't get the terms they wanted from Tribune for KCPQ pre-Nexstar purchase. Fox of course is pretty happy now with not having to run "Fox 24 Seattle" and a WBTS-esque mess of a translator network with a main tower 80 miles from downtown.

All addressed by the STELA act; local stations have blackout rights to overlay O&O's, no matter what, and you have to go through a process that includes actual U.S. mail in order to convince your local station (even a MyNetworkTV affiliate) to watch an OOM station such as WWOR or WABC, and you have to show literal proof, including pictures, documentation and video to show 'yeah, I can't get this station at all by antenna, I can't get cable which offers it, and I'm out of range of a streamer to get this station'...and maybe they'll approve your request, but that's also a crapshoot.