Surplus Engineer

21 hours ago, DENDude said:

Do all of scripps stations have hubed master control?    And what stations are out of Indy?  & what stations are out of Norfolk?   

The Cordillera stations are not hubbed as well as Tallahassee and Waco. Norfolk has Richmond, KSTU, WSFL, WTVF, and KMTV. I think Indianapolis has the rest, including the Katz networks. 

Denver doesn't have a hub and MC is hubbed from Indianapolis. They were hubbed there when they were McGraw Hill. The Now and other news products come from Denver and Indianapolis distributes for that too.

On 2/28/2021 at 3:25 PM, Route66Fan said:

KPXE-TV is now showing Court TV on Ch. 50.2, Grit on Ch. 50.3 & Laff on Ch. 50.4. Interestingly, there seems to be a 10 second delay between the Laff feed on Ch. 50.4, compared to Ch. 41.3.

 

That's not surprising. Two separate air chains and two separate transmitters will yield variations that big and bigger. From being brought in on the same IRD to going through switchers, EAS, graphics, encoders, STL. Older gear and/or more links in the chain will delay the signal.

51 minutes ago, CircleSeven said:

And it looks like the Lighthouse are going pack it in with eight streams (Ion & the 7 subs) on the Ion spectrum (once those contracts from the other distributors run out). As what Lisa Knutson said:

 

I'm surprised they didn't eliminate HSN/QVC while they canned Qubo & Ion Plus over the weekend.

 

It's about money. If they looked at the books when they were making the Ion purchase and saw that Qubo and Ion Plus were losing money and HSN/QVC were in the black, then guess what they keep.

On 3/1/2021 at 2:04 AM, mrschimpf said:

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.

The way Scripps does master control, hubbing doesn't free up any real space. The same equipment is sitting there in Milwaukee or Denver, it's just controlled remotely.

Someone mentioned how tech cores are surprisingly empty. I guess it depends on what kind of a station and what the responsibilities are locally. If you're hubbed in a way where you are central casted and you have basically a newsroom, sales, staff, and a transmitter, sure, probably. But a lot of stations today have as much or more gear as they have ever had and most of the engineers I know at stations are constantly trying to find room to put more racks because they have to add more IRD's, encoders, TVU Grid receivers, servers, and they're now housing newsroom automation, and general IT infrastructure for the rest of the station.

I wonder if this means KXXV gets Grit and Escape on their subchannels. Maybe they end up being a new Court TV affiliate too. Makes sense for Scripps to piggyback their network growth on top of their own growth plan.

7 hours ago, T.L. Hughes said:

That'll be interesting, Court TV will have Tribune/Nexstar, Citadel, Entravision, Univision and Scripps as its initial launch groups. Scripps is basically helping Katz with bankrolling the venture since offering hours of live trial coverage each weekday would necessitate resources that Katz would have needed outside capital to raise when it was an independent company. What's not clear, though, is how much of a hand will Scripps' own stations have in the network's coverage.

 

It appears the OTA multicast version of Court TV may have a better or similar level of distribution compared to the cable version when it launched. Even still, it will still lack some clearance in certain areas for a few years, I would think. Digital multicasting is roughly at a point in its development to where cable was when Court TV launched in the early 1990s (minus the fact that there are no kids' channels akin in format to Nickelodeon or Disney [the ones that do exist are consigned to those that are E/I-compliant until elements of the Children's Television Act that made conventional children's shows unmarketable OTA are repealed], no pay services similar in structure to HBO, Showtime or even ONTV and SelecTV, and very few news and sports networks). Newer networks like Court TV and NewsNet will struggle to maintain clearances reaching more than 80% of the U.S., a la the major networks, PBS and MeTV, until every full-power station in all 210 markets consigns to the ATSC 3.0 standard. That standard would also make it so that certain networks wouldn't have to resort to LPTV outlets just to pad out coverage in large and mid-sized markets.

This opens up an alternate scenario for the WHDT purchase. They make WHDT a new Court TV affiliate and they instantly get clearance in West Palm Beach, Miami, and Boston in one fell swoop. Or it could be a complete coincidence and they just toss a bunch of syndicated shows on it.

Does anyone think that Scripps or TEGNA will or are at least interested in buying WBNX as part of a duoply with WEWS or WKYC?

I don’t see why not.

Consolidation for consolidations sake is how local tv will end up like radio. Controlled by a few penny pinching companies with huge piles of debt

Consolidation is happening in TV the same way it happened in radio for the same reason it happened in radio and newspapers. Declining revenue and declining margins due to a dwindling customer base. Fewer people are watching local TV because of ever growing options and an increasingly fractured public. Fewer clients are buying ads. And when they are, they're paying less money because they can do math.

This is the reason every station group is decreasing staffing levels. Why every station group is investing in technology that helps eliminate jobs. Why everybody's favorite anchor is now working PR for a hospital or government entity. The groups everyone loves. The groups everyone hates. The groups that put out a consistently good product. The groups that put out a halfassed product. They're all doing the same thing and they're all looking to merge because scale is one of the only ways to maintain margins.

Grow up everyone. You're in a dying industry. Clicking your heels and chanting to yourself there's no place like 1996 isn't going to get you anywhere. I've lost enough friends in the business over the years and know enough people who are still in this godforsaken business to tell you to keep your resume in good enough shape to get you a job in the real world. If you zoom out far enough to see the future, you can see that we're all screwed. The indignant, immature state of denial that this entire forum seems to exist in makes my eyes nearly roll out of their sockets.

scripps is barely investing in WGBA outside of (necessary) technology upgrades. vizrt/the virtual set and HD news are a sign of that. keeping the staff lean makes me feel that they are going to try to "flip" the station. green bay seems too small market for scripps, and i bet they dump it in the future. same goes for WSYM in lansing.

 

WGBA and WTMJ getting talent opens at the exact same time is no coincidence. TMJ's art department is operating as a partial extension of the scripps graphics hub, doing the graphics transitions of the journal group. that's why the rollout is so slow.

We may have reached peak TVNewstalk forums! Congrats everyone!

They aren't going to unload a duopoly in a swing state. And they certainly aren't going to do so with a rationale that market 68 is too small for them when they just specifically went out and got WKBW a few years ago in market 53. They've held onto KJRH in market 60 for decades. And Tucson and Omaha are looking up at Green Bay.

The entire industry is getting lean. That's not a trend that is ever going to reverse. Everybody is going towards consolidating things like graphics and traffic.

Ignite isn't a very good system... Errors are way up and they are usually bizarre "how is that possible?!?!" Errors.

I can't speak to the nature or severity of errors, but stating that Ignite is bad still does nothing to distinguish them from every other group out there. It might be the market leader in that particular technology, a technology that as stated earlier, almost every group has purchased.

Scripps is installing Ignite and hubbing master control to cut cost in the long term, employing people cost alot of money. It really isn't alot of money to spend investing in automation but it can cause alot of problems.

As criticisms go, that's some weak tea. It makes Scripps pretty much like everybody else. Who doesn't hub anymore? Sinclair, Gray, Tegna, Tribune, Meredith, and Raycom all hub. I've heard Hearst does, but I don't know anybody there. I don't know about Hubbard, Calkins, Graham, or Quincy either. Lin had MC hubs. Media General has them. Nexstar has them. ABC and NBC O&O's don't even do their own hubbing. They farm it out. Fox and CBS hub.

That being said, I know for a fact Scripps hasn't hubbed the Journal stations. That might still be in the future, but I've heard no chatter yet.

In terms of Ignite-type systems, I've heard even Dispatch has brought that in recently. It's the way broadcasting is done in 2016. I went to lunch with somebody from an old McGraw Hill station recently, they had automation production control 10 years before joining Scripps. Scripps hired enough people that they're having trouble finding parking spots. McGraw Hill was cheap. I know with Buffalo, Granite was crazy cheap and there was open celebration that they'd been purchased. Now they're expanding the number of hours of news they're running or at least they will once they actually start running their weekend morning news.

And the systems aren't cheap. Corporate-wide rollout costs millions and have a 3+ year return on investment depending on what equipment you buy and how you structure your setup.

There are plenty of valid criticisms available concerning content. Hitting them for doing the same thing everybody does seems nitpicky.

Well, it happened. FOX is now only on WTVC 9.2 in Chattanooga, and has changed its branding from "FOX 61" to "FOX Chattanooga". WDSI meanwhile has ThisTV on 61.1 and Comet TV on 61.2. MNT has moved to WFLI 53.2. Chattanooga is now the largest market (and first Top 100 market) to have FOX on a subchannel of a Big 3 station.

http://www.rabbitears.info/market.php?request=station_search&callsign=22590#station

http://www.rabbitears.info/market.php?request=station_search&callsign=72060#station

http://www.rabbitears.info/market.php?request=station_search&callsign=22590#station

It's amazing this is okay

Yes I did.....

I don't think anybody mentioned that Sinclair has a deal in place to buy KUQI in Corpus Christi for $9.25M. That's a reasonable price.

It will be interesting to see if they're planning on keeping it a stand-alone operation or if they're planning on partnering with KIII/Tegna on a shared services or if they hub it out to the point where the only things to find locally is a small sales office and a transmitter.

I was looking at the Scripps roster and I know they've said they aren't interested in the spectrum auction, but they HAVE to be looking at it for their low power Azteca affiliates. By my count, the FCC auction estimate for them is about 180 million to about 300 million. They already carry this programming as subchannels of KMGH, KGTV, and KERO. That's a lot of cash for something that probably isn't adding anything to the bottom line.

San Diego values are crazy high.

How is this even possible?

I think their traffic info and reports come from another company. The videos I've seen have what looks like a law enforcement officer giving the traffic report from what looks like a different studio.

If it is a California government provided service, that could explain a lot.