nathannah

The TMJ4 exodus continues; Shannon Sims is departing next Tuesday.

A perfect time to bring up another of Manoj Bhargava's projects that failed; ShopHQ's IP has been bought by The Arena Group, which you might remember as the Maven Group that tried to run Sports Illustrated but failed, and also has other dead-tree brands such as Parade and Men's Journal. The site's back up online and selling things (and they're back on social media), which may just be a combo of leftover inventory combined with dropshipping.

From last night, Amazon previewed their new permanent sports set (mainly for NBA coverage) during TNF;

Someone in their design department is wed to them keeping Bank Gothic as long as they can, and I definitely admire that.

The league feels like an event again, they really got this right so much. ESPN has always felt RSN-equivalent in production and 720p does not do the product justice; finally having a basketball broadcaster in 1080i/p, it's always felt so different than the former. And they managed to get an overtime, so it'll be a dream launch night for them.

And they now require you to sign in to watch more than fifteen minutes; I get the feeling that weather stream on YouTube is WIAT's own weather staff creating their own solution to Irving's web direction that apparently takes cues from AOL's Digital City in 1998 (as a walled garden) rather than right now where they're just tripping their own employees up in trying to expand their reach.

The change was finally noted on WPMI's website (with nothing on WEAR's site)...this morning at 9:10 a.m. It feels like they've been trying to sneak these by over-the-air viewers and hoping that they didn't notice anything.

I saw that during a bandscan and was puzzled and read it as 'True Crimzzz' or 'TRUE C13IVIZ' because of how poor that font is. Just use regular letters, folks.

Scripps pushed the rings to some of their stations already, but Hearst seems like one of the few station groups who still care about sweeps, so they'll wait until then.

And now James Franklin has been fired as Penn State's football coach. I only mention this because he has a $49.5 million contract buyout three times beyond PSU's planned contribution to WPSU that the university will pay, so somehow this becomes more offensive on second glance as to the school's true priorities (and there's also a new scandal involving switching their athletic outfitting deal from Nike to Adidas).

MSG has introduced a nicely minimalistic and left-justified design for their NBA package, including a simple and sleek bug (though I suspect by opening night that shot clock will get a bit bigger). Apologies for the 'direct from monitor' image because of DRM. And then from the next morning, we have a game from China on NBA TV, which now under league control has introduced this interesting package which feels a bit odd and 2015-like?

It'll probably either through their existing Spectrum News app (which is already on Xumo boxes and TVs by default) or they'll make them available through the X1 lineup and authenticated in that manner, with phones and tablets getting the 'log in through Xfinity' option)..

Here's an example of the Hearst ticker on during GMA (for a local breast cancer campaign), which definitely looks a lot better than the default ticker. I much prefer this to a text ticker which has the same eight stories until 8:55 either national or local.

That they use their ticker rather than the default ones Today and GMA use, which seem to be updated once at 6:59 am and quickly become irrelevant and out of date both locally and nationally.

It also seems to be have been stripped of everything but temperatures? I'm not seeing traffic times or stories at all, just the usual 'follow our staff on social' ticker message. Also disappointed that they have never thought to overlay the default morning show tickers with their richer tickers.

I had a feeling this was happening; Spectrum just launched a 4K feed of NBC Sports events for their Xumo platform on their app (though no NFL right now), so it was just a matter of when they'd do so everywhere else before the Versant split. And this will make putting on games in bars a whole lot easier than having to deal with an access broker like you have to for ESPN streaming-only events and Sunday Ticket.

To the probable relief of the anchors who have had to pull exhausting overtime since Michelle McCormack got herself fired for a DUI (and a coincidental re-retirement of Kris Schuller earlier), WFRV in Green Bay has hired Stacy Engebretson to become their new evening co-anchor. She had been on WGBA for a long time before moving to a mostly off-air role as an assistant ND and community anchor for WBAY. Just in time too, because Tom Zalaski looks and sounds physically exhausted from having to solo anchor for months upon months, and Chelly Boutott can finally return to mornings.

It still has its double-run on My24 in Milwaukee at 5pm daily, so it obviously didn't leave at all. It may have been downgraded in several markets to accommodate the new Seinfeld contract, but that airs on a completely different station in Milwaukee (WITI>WMLW).

Someone on another forum said it was actually the CBC series Workin' Moms, which is on Netflix in the US (but obviously the CRTC doesn't about language on broadcast as much as our puritan FCC); what it sounds like is the employee was running it on another screen and the audio unmuted and tried to blame the poor AccuWeather guy for what looks like her screw up. Several employees for WINS work from home so even then, running it on an Audacy device is not the thing to do.

This entire situation is reminding me of what ABS-CBN went through when their license was pulled under obvious political pressure...and somehow the company seems to be working just fine with several time buys and adjusting their cable channels to that new reality, so there is a template for a move from broadcast to cable/streaming in the world, and as I said when they began to ramp up their stake in Hulu, a rebrand of that to ABC is not out of the question at all (or as a Disney+ sub-brand). Freeform is back on Spectrum too so they can easily shift that channel and finally talk CBN out of giving up their time for a good financial price. But there's also the affiliates that are happy with the network and found the entire Kimmel thing stupid because they don't run entire news arms devoted to being lower-tier Fox News Channel clones and as long as they don't have someone drop a C-bomb on purpose or expose anything on-air, they're just fine, grumpy old viewers be damned. Those are the stations I worry about more if that happens. That, and I'm not ready to give up on dramas and sitcoms that still exist.

It took me a second to realize this was at 11pm, not 10pm because they run the entire edition of the National News Desk. I wonder if it's just a replay of NTV's 10pm show, because if it's specifically made for the station, it's baffling scheduling.

According to Spectrum and my TiVo picking up its listings, the 'rebranded' Envoy is being added to their systems; it hasn't shown up yet as an active channel (and I've removed it because...eww). Right now it's all Dr. Phil and The Doctors repeats along with other specials, so unless he settles with TBN soon it's going to remain that (and a massive waste of money for both Dr. Phil and Spectrum subscribers). I also don't understand why he wouldn't wait until the bankruptcy hearing is over because this would definitely raise eyebrows with the court.

Sadly I think they care more about propping up the CW than acquiring another network affiliation these days; they control the network and the rest of the schedule, so taking a network affiliation would get in the way of the revenue they get (I would love to hear how them and KDNL's favorite advertiser Bommarito had to handle all the feedback this week, because you know they got a lot).

Still better than the 2000s when they were still rocking the 1991 vintage graphics and the dark corner of the newsroom for them and Up to the Minute. For a morning newscast that had been stuck with 'last man up' at CBS O&Os during the pandemic, it's actually fine.

And because ESPN isn't really good at hockey broadcasting you obviously get a whole bunch of 'turn up the radio' viewers when the Blues make their 'once in a blue moon' appearance on ABC, which is literally their only pro sports blip outside Metro East supporters of Chicago teams. This isn't even accounting for the Sony game shows now streaming on Hulu and Peacock, meaning if you can't stand the Nexstar or Sinclair station it airs on now you can vote with your remote now that they're not the only game in town. Sony has to be sick of hearing complaints about political advertising on those shows and having news promos from those stations with the same tone ruining the 'fun' mood they try to set (once the first few months of streaming ratings come out, we're in for a very rude awakening, I predict).