Nostalgic Baton Rouge History Tonight at 7:00 WAFB 9

This has been done more than once. What’s different about this one?

No new George & Mandy? FFS

Hully gully

Graffiti pier

It was nice that local channels had their own programming back in the day. Now the stations are all owned by the same conglomerate and the world is a shithole.

I loved that show as a kid. My younger brother and I watched the show faithfully every single weekday.

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It was nice that local channels had their own programming back in the day. Now the stations are all owned by the same conglomerate and the world is a shithole.

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Yep. And these stations wonder why YouTube/TikTok/Facebook has taken over their monopoly on content. Social Media content can be produced independently and not be dependent on traditional media conforms like programs being a specific lenght, meeting certain levels professionalism, adversting breaks, etc.

If you indulge, let me geek out on my understanding of the business of TV.

I have seen stations that have grown complacent on running network or content produced by the station group. Some of this is due to trends in changing advertisers as companies got larger they felt less of a need to depend on local entertainment content while focusing on news, weather, and sports because that is what the advertisers wanted to buy.

Networks also wanted local stations to carry more Network content instead of local programming.

Then you have the result of private equity and Wall Street sucking the soul of these legacy stations like newspapers and goobling up other stations and station groups building up debt and putting the stations in a negative cash situation despite have 2 income streams from advertising and retransmission fees. I have heard some cable systems are charging as much as 40 dollars for Local Channel fee in addition to your subscription level because of the increases in retransmission fees.

No wonder consumers are ditching cable and going with YouTubeTV and other virtual cable systems that bypass the local stations on this fee grab and negotiate with the networks for retransmission fees.

The high fees evolved as the old business model of TV flipped. In the early days of television, the business model was that TV Networks sought out local affiliates to carry their programming and paid them to run their shows and sporting events. Networks also sought out powerful VHF station for their reach and the fact that most TV's did not have UHF tuners at the time.

Most networks also gave affliates a certain amount of time to sell during network programming for local breaks as additional income.

All this started to change in the 1990's as the NFL and other sports started to command higher and higher sports rights fees. Around the same time, Must Carry was ruled on by the Supreme Court that gave large stations an option where either a station could force a cable system to carry their signal for free, of if they wanted compensation the cable system had the option to pay for it or not carry it at the risk of losing viewers.

As the revenue models on the local level changed, TV networks started paying less to stations to carry their networks and eventually flipped to where they wanted money from the stations to carry their network. The stations kept increasing retransmission fees to increase revenues so they could balance what they had to pay the network that wasn't coming in via advertising.

This also comes as stations groups started to consolidate and get larger and larger. The larger the station group, the better negotiation power the station had over a cable provider who also grew through consolidation. So as one station group wanted more money, that would mean more stations would get impacted by a cable system so they would get squeezed for higher and higher retransmission fees. The same could be true for larger station groups having more power with the networks. The more power a station group had over a network the better terms a station group could get with a network.

That is your Tiger Dropping Summary of the business of TV. There is a whole lot more like costs. Not everything is free for the station, they still have to pay for wire news services like AP, software licensing, music licensing, electrical power, insurance, telco lines for backhauls and data connections, etc. While you compare that to a social media content producer who may not have to deal with any of those things as they churn out content that gets more views that local TV.