dman748

Now union members are looking into legal action against Sinclair over the layoffs

https://www.ftvlive.com/sqsp-test/2021/3/12/the-union-looks-at-legal-action-in-regards-to-the-sinclair-layoffs

To add further insult to injury for Sinclair, Moody's just downgraded its Diamond Sports unit yet again

 https://www.bizjournals.com/baltimore/news/2021/03/09/moodys-downgrades-sinclairs-sports-networks-again.html

And the most troubling part of all is this quote

Quote

The agency also warned that Sinclair's RSNs could be downgraded again if the company fails to meet the higher end of its guidance.

"A failure to renew key distributor relationships in 2021 could lead to concerns over the sustainability of the capital structure," according to Moody's.

The fact that Dish will be dropping the NBC RSNs does not give me full confidence that the Sinclair RSNs will ever be back on Dish even if Sinclair and Dish came to terms on the local stations side of things.

1 hour ago, tyrannical bastard said:

The seeds of WGN (America's) decline were planted long ago, and are mostly rooted in the changing times of cable television.

 

The big draw of WGN to begin with was the Cubs/White Sox & Bulls telecasts.  Then the sports world got too expensive, and these games began slowly slipping away.  Also, WGN itself as a SuperStation was just happenstance, since it was another company that distributed the signal nationally, and SyndEx took some of the local flavor out of it.

 

Flash forward to around 2008 and the privatization of Tribune by Sam Zell, that's when the deliberate destruction began.  The "eye" logo and the antics of Randy Michaels coupled with a long and twisted trip into bankruptcy.

 

Then came the "original programs" that came and went, and until Sincl....I mean Nexstar took over, WGN was a shell of its former self.

 

I'm sure had Sinclair gotten WGN America, they would have done the same thing, but would have been a little less restrained about the slant than Nexstar was.

 

It's just a boring time right now, given all we've been through over the past year or four.....

This 1 million times over.

It really proves that in 2021, trying to start a cable channel of any genre is just not a wise idea.

1 hour ago, Kenneth Kissel said:

same thing happened in 2006.

13 minutes ago, tyrannical bastard said:

Much of that was the end of the "News Central" experiment, which actually gutted some existing newsrooms before (like WPGH), but added newscasts to their other netlet stations with content from Baltimore.

WLFL did shutter theirs around the same time....were they ever NewsCentral-ized?

I smell something similar to this happening this time around. I don't think its impossible for somebody at a Sinclair station to suffer what WPGH suffered.

22 hours ago, JCB4TV said:

I wonder whether this will lead to more Sinclair newscasts being centralized.

I will say yes and no.

It will all depend on the level of cuts Sinclair makes at the stations, I will say the ones that suffers the biggest cuts will in all likelihood see newscasts being hubbed elsewhere, those that doesn't see the biggest cuts will probably see their news department remain in tact.

6 hours ago, scrabbleship said:

 

Sinclair is a bit different. They built themselves on Fox and netlets, not the other way around.

Actually what I meant to say is that there are at least several Fox affiliates owned by Sinclair that fits into the WZDX type of stations I consider KDNL/WXLV to be Sinclair's equivalent of WATN/WOI without a full scale news department. 

15 minutes ago, scrabbleship said:

Hey, it can't be any different than the WZDX's, WATN's, and WOI's of the group. With enough work they could reach WPMT/WTIC tier.

We can consider many Sinclair stations to be in that category.

3 minutes ago, GoldenShine9 said:

Were any big names laid off? I know high-level news positions don't come along very often (i.e. News Director, Evening Anchor, Chief Meteorologist).

Keith Taylor (a big name in the Tulsa market) got the axe, WZTV's sports department wasn't the only ones that got hit hard, the Sports department at WTVC was all but pretty much wiped out, Heather Mills, Gerard Ramalho, Jerry Brown and Amber Dixon all of KSNV all of them victims of the layoffs.

There's so many of them it will be difficult to A. Mention all of the ones laid off. B. It would become a list thread. I may need to create a new message thread with you about this discussion.

6 hours ago, Myron Falwell said:

The likeliest outcome does not involve the mass selling of stations, but is twofold:

 

1.) The holding company for the RSNs goes bankrupt and taken over by creditors who can resolve debts. In fact, that happened with Comcast’s ill-fated Houston RSN. If Sinclair were to offload their stake now, they would be getting hosed big-time.

 

2.) Sinclair winds up like Granite, but in too big to fail mode. (Actually, a better comparison would be iHeart and Cumulus when they entered Chapter 11. You’ll note that there was never a fire sale of stations for either radio operator but it killed off whatever M&A mindset existed for the radio industry.) But indeed, there are multiple stations that Sinclair can cut to the bone like Granite did to WKBW.

 

Sure, a white knight investor like Byron Allen could swoop in, but only if the Smith family is stripped of control of the company. But by then, would it be worth it for Byron?

On that 1st one, I think Sinclair would deserve to be hosed by the same people who hosed them for buying the RSNs in the first place.

On the 2nd one I see it as a mix of Granite and Clear Channel/iHeart however I see it as more like Granite than Clear Channel as I think Sinclair is way too big for one owner to take on all 160+ stations, I see it as more like the type of deals they just recently made with KBSI/WDKA.

1 hour ago, tyrannical bastard said:

They can blame COVID all they want, but these layoffs are a direct result of the RSN bubble bursting, not to mention the $48 MILLION fine levied against them for their business practices, namely the bungled Tribune merger and their failure to properly disclose sponsored content.

 

it was bound to happen eventually and I imagine it's going to get a lot worse in the weeks and months to come.

I can definitely see that point as well, one has to wonder where Sinclair might've been at if it weren't for Deadspin exposing them for their "extremely dangerous" script.

I'm definitely going the conservative route in saying only the RSNs getting sold by Diamond as part of that network's reorganization and even with that I might've underestimated how much worse this could get in not just the weeks ahead but in the months to come.

As I said before on Discord and I will say this here as well.

Honestly I think the cable TV bubble and the pay TV industry as a whole is about to burst and burst HARD.

Sinclair is going to have no choice but to let the RSNs go bankrupt and reorganize itself into a new business model (it's got absolutely zero choice but to do so), they "might" sell a few stations here and there other than that Sinclair is going to have no choice but to do the layoffs and just let the RSNs go under. It's going to happen anyway.

Hate to bump up a thread that hasn't been posted in nearly a month but..

The remaining NBC RSNs are being dropped by Sling starting April 1st https://thestreamable.com/news/sling-tv-to-drop-remaining-nbc-sports-rsns-ahead-of-mlb-season

We can sit there and say "Charlie is being cheap" all we want but unfortunately, like the Sinclair RSNs, him and his team are absolutely correct about the RSNs 

This was from a recent interview when asked about bringing the RSNs back to Sling

Quote

“I think it’s difficult,” said Schwimmer. “The thing for most customers to realize is, Regional Sports Networks are a terrible deal for customers.”

He continued, “Because there’s very limited viewership. And yet everybody has to pay for them…it really inflates the bill. We’d rather give the vast majority of our customers a good deal.”

In order to keep Sling’s prices low, regional sports, like locals – has been one of the areas that they’ve dropped from the service.

“We have to make choices, and our choice (with) regional sports…is keeping everybody’s bill low, as opposed to carrying something that in the end gets very limited viewership. There are some passionate fans, and we wish we could serve them by offering this content on à la carte basis.”

In fact, Schwimmer said that if RSNs could be offered on an à la carte basis, Sling “would offer every regional sports channel in America in a heartbeat.” But, that’s not an option right now because “what the regional sports providers want is, is for us to to make them available to everybody, even the people that don’t want them. And that’s where it breaks down.”

That right there is the reason why we may never see the RSNs return to the streamers or even on cable, they need to come up with either a DTC plan or offering it to customers on an a la carte basis, so far the networks don't want to do either one and we will have to wait until '22 before Sinclair comes out with it's own DTC service.

9 hours ago, ScottJ said:

Sinclair won't be making the RSNs available to unauthenticated users. Per Ripley's quote, the DTC option "will allow an unauthenticated user the ability to access and even subscribe to certain content from our RSNs, as well as other unique content."

 

I bolded the important part. Just certain content will be available to people who can't authenticate. I'm pretty sure that means MLB/NBA/NHL games won't be available that way. It'll likely be just pre/postgame shows and other studio shows/non-game programming. That's a key distinction to make.

I probably didn't read the article very well then. I thought it said something about being able to watch like games directly on that service.

Sinclair's DTC service isn't expected to launch until 2022 https://thestreamable.com/news/sinclair-wont-bring-rebranded-fox-sports-rsns-direct-to-consumer-until-2022

The fact that they're looking into making it available to even those who don't have a way to authenticate their satellite/streaming services to the RSNs is.. a rather interesting proposition here.

1 hour ago, channel2 said:

Oh that would make too much sense. Give them another ten years or so to get a clue.

Or longer.

Something this "easy" (in reality its hard due to logistical-related stuff) for sports leagues to figure out that cable isn't in the team's future has become extremely difficult for them and eventually, they will pay the price for that.

Heck it's taken the leagues this long to realize that OTT is the future of TV

13 hours ago, LoadStar said:

Did the Brewers really have a viable option other than Sinclair/Bally Sports?

 

The only OTA broadcaster who I think might have been interested would have been Weigel (they probably would have been thrilled to put the Brewers on WMLW), but I don't think they had the money to outbid Sinclair, nor the resources to actually produce Brewers games on an ongoing basis.

 

As far as cable channels, there isn't really an alternative to the RSNs, and Bally Sports is the only one in this area.

I think many sports leagues and teams are eventually going to have to consider moving to OTT. I think that the recent news about MSG possibly taking its RSNs to OTT is a good example of what I see coming to the RSN genre as a whole

15 hours ago, JCB4TV said:

From Wichita Falls:

 

Power outage knocks KFDX off the air

I would assume that KFDX doesn't have a backup generator to keep the power at the station going. It's also possible that KFDX might not have a generator either and for a market the size of Wichita Falls, I wouldn't be surprised at all if they didn't have one at all.

3 hours ago, ScottSchell said:

I can tell you they dropped Live with Kelly and Ryan for the 9AM newscast they didn't renew the contract to air them on KWTV.

Which I've been seeing promos that Live is moving to KOKH at the same time.

Not sure how we missed this but KWTV is launching a 9am newscast (competing against KOCO for news in that timeslot) beginning January 18th:

But the changes doesn't stop there and I'll share more details in the 2020 syndication news thread once I find the link to it.

10 minutes ago, GoldenShine9 said:

 

It would be virtually impossible. The only way I can see Nexstar with WGCL is if an owner already in the market (i.e. Cox or Tegna) acquired Meredith. Unless they are looking at another station (i.e. the CBS-owned CW station)?

 

Of the 12 markets that Meredith is in, Nexstar is in 9 of them. That's a deal that will NEVER work.

Or Meredith goes piecemeal. Either of the 3 will be the only way how Nexstar gets Atlanta.

2 minutes ago, tyrannical bastard said:

Tons of conflicts....

 

Greenville/Spartanburg has WSPA/WYCW

Mobile has WKRG/WFNA (along with Sinclair running every other station)

St. Louis has KTVI/KPLR

Portland has KOIN/KRCW (and Meredith owns KPTV and KPDX)

Las Vegas has KLAS

Springfield, MA has WWLP

Hartford has WTNH/WCTX

Nashville has WKRN

Plus Kansas City (WDAF vs KCTV/KSMO).

Either way there's a ton of conflicts in the Meredith deal that it only makes sense for Nexstar and Meredith to swap out each other's stations.

I had to reread the FTVLive article the 2nd time and it appears to me that uncle Perry only wants Atlanta and only Atlanta which tells me that he might be willing to depart a market or two in order to get Atlanta without needed to have the entire Meredith chain.

I'm not sure Meredith is as willing to depart the broadcasting biz (other than splitting the company up into 2) as what we might have initially thought when the talks that Meredith "might" split started to prop up.

Thanks to Mr. Sloan we have more OKC TV stuff uncovered.

First we go to the Station "Where the News Comes First.. 24 Hours a Day.", that's KFOR in 1992. This one is one of the 2 interesting transitional periods that took place at 444 East Britton Road throughout the 1990s and this was one of them. In this instance they have dropped "News Team 4" for "News Channel 4" but kept the same theme song they've used (at that time) since the 1990 callsign change. And yes that is Bob Bruce before he left for what is now known KSAZ in 1992.

Next up, KOCO and KWTV (and yes this was during Jon Slater's first stint here in OKC prior to going up the Turner to Tulsa): 

Sadly 2020 and Pancreatic Cancer just had to take another precious life away from us.

KWTV Chief Photographer Greg Blackwood sadly passed away and Morning Anchor Robin Marsh posted the sad news on Facebook.

On 12/9/2020 at 6:53 PM, JCB4TV said:

Retransmission disputes with Dish are not short.

The dispute between them and the FSNs are a prime example of that. The difference between OTA stations and Cable channels is that the latter isn't as much of a "must-carry" the OTA stations are and that might explain why the Cox stations were able to get back on Dish in somewhat of a timely manner and why still over a year later the FSNs aren't on Dish.