Sinclair is selling WLWC

[CircleSeven 1944]

Okay, looking through the FCC site every night, I was very shocked to see that Sinclair has appeared to sell another television station. This time, its the CW station, WLWC 28 in Providence, RI. Sinclair bought WLWC as a part of the Four Points Media acquisition back in late 2011. Of course Four Points Media (which was formed by Cerberus Capital Management) bought the stations from CBS back in 2007.

 

The shocking thing of all of this is the buyer. Through this paperwork, OTA Broadcasting, which owns two stations in Seattle (Including one that use to be owned by Newport Television (KVOS in Bellingham, WA)) is buying WLWC 28 for purchase price of $13.75 million.

 

What's really shocking about this, not only this will be Sinclair's second divestiture (after WLAJ 53 in Lansing three months ago) in God knows how long, but is that OTA Broadcasting is one of a few companies out there right now, that are currently buying television stations, only to hopefully resell the licenses for the upcoming incentive auctions, as the FCC wants to reclaim its spectrum for wireless broadband use.

 

The auctions may include plans to repack stations, basically meaning to have two channels lets say channel 5 & channel 8 would share the same frequency, instead of two different frenquencies, so that can free up more frequencies for broadband use.

 

My take, television stations have spent billions of dollars before and after the 2009 digital transition and let alone the problematic VHF frequencies for digital use that move many channels to the UHF dial, you want them to go back to the VHF so these wireless companies can take channels 31-51 (I dunno if they will follow through with that channel grid, but they are gradually starting to vacate on channel 51), like they did with 52-69? Not only that will kill over-the-air television, the low-power stations will no doubt go dark and some other channels wlll eventually go dark because of interference in adjacent channels in-market and/or adjacent channels from adjacent markets. And this will really hurt the vast majority of people who don't have cable TV, that heavily rely on over-the-air television.

 

Now I'm all for everyone to get affordable broadband internet use, but not at a cost to losing any OTA television channels in the process. That's why everytime I read these articles about how the incentive auction process is going to go, which the FCC wants to start this process in 2014, that shit makes me want to cringe so bad. TV stations would have to shell out even more money to move channels again like they did in 2009 and some broadcasters (especially for the low-power that probably wants to stay in the business) will lose big time.

[CircleSeven 1944]

This morning, the FCC has greenlighted the assignment of license of WLWC to OTA Broadcasting, LLC.