re: Lafaytte TV- KADN AND KATC to merge

I grew up in Lafayette. Got most of the BR affiliates, Laffy, and KPLC out of Lake Charles.

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I would watch the brand new episode on the Lafayette station at 10 am, then the previous day's rerun episode on the Baton Rouge station at 11

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WAFB was known for this because it was one of the few stations in the country that ran the Young and the Restless in the afternoon instead of the 11 am central time window that most other stations ran it. I think they did this to cater to the ladies of LSU who wanted to watch the soap after class. Nationally and on the East Coast Y&R airs after the noon news at 12:30.

The overall quality of the media in Lafayette is low. I can remember the glory days of Maria Placer and Jim Baronet with the news, Jim Olivier on Passé Partout, Mike Barras on Meet Your Neighbor and Dick Fauvrot with the weather. The early morning news was in French.
Hell, I remember Ed Marshall with Wednesday’s Child. All on CBS - KLFY.
True professionals.

Money must be super tight.

We have the same problem here in Beirut Rouge, I don't even watch the local news any longer. It's all mickey mouse.

I remember these guys on KLFY on Saturday afternoons,



Aldus Roger and the Lafayette Playboys

I don’t like figs that say sheesh.

Love it

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I grew up in Lafayette. Got most of the BR affiliates, Laffy, and KPLC out of Lake Charles.

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I grew up in South Lafourche where ole Callais Cable carried New Orleans and Baton Rouge stations. They had 36 channels by the late 1980’s. By the 2010’s, Callais now rebranded to Vision after being sold to Latelco dropped the Baton Rouge channels as they got harder to receive after the digital change over.

But back to the wild early days of cable TV.

In my one of my parents South Lafourche yearbooks in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s when Callais Cable first launched, they had 13 channels of local TV channels.

Back then they carried the major stations in New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and maybe even Biloxi or Mobile as a shared stations. This was well before most TV stations broadcast 24/7 and satellite cable tv networks launched.

Callais depended on high gain antennas to receive all those channels on a tall tower. The Houma cable systems followed pretty much the same format.

Most of the bayou area cable systems carried KLFY into the early 1990’s because of the Saints. While WAFB and WWL would get blacked out often, the cable systems were still able to show the Saints on KLFY’s feed. By the 1990’s, the NFL left CBS for Fox and that left a hole where there no need for a 3rd CBS affiliate in KLFY. Also, the Cable Act of 1992 introduced retransmission consent or must carry rights for carriage of TV stations in local markets. Stations could also limit and blackout network and certain syndicated programs if they were duplicated on a secondary out of market channel. Fox actually pushed their local stations hard on this and in many areas, you would be pretty hard pressed to find two Fox affiliates on a single cable system.

In certain markets this is pretty bad, like around New York City where, the regional cable systems outside of the NYC DMA want to carry the major stations of New York City like WCBS, WNBC, WABC, etc., but they cannot carry those stations network programming or syndicated programming like Wheel of Fortune because of the local station that carries those programs enforces the syndicated exclusivity rules, so the only thing you got on those NYC channels were the local news.

To this day, in Houma on Comcast they still carry WBRZ, WAFB, and WLPB on their lineup. On Spectrum, they carry those same 3 Baton Rouge stations and WVLA too.

Comcast and Charter in Houma do not carry WGMB. What is crazy is that in Houma with a decent antenna, you can pick up WVLA and WGMB’s signals better than WDSU and WVUE. WAFB and WBRZ are very hard to pickup because they choose poorly when they elected to stay on the VHF band in the digital change over from analog.

To WBRZ’s credit, they were given the channel 13 allotment by the FCC when digital was introduced, WAFB had a UHF allotment and elected to go back to VHF after the change over. If memory serves me, WAFB actually never built full power pre transition digital facilities on UHF at several hundred kW and elected to broadcast their digital signal on top of their downtown tower on a medium to low power station.

The final post transition digital channel 9 signal clocked in at about 5-6 kW compared to WBRZ’s 45 kW of power on channel 13. Then on UHF side of things, WVLA pushes out 1,000 kW. One reason why the WAFB’s signal was given such a low power allotment is that it was sandwiched between KLFY (10) and WVUE (8) post transition.

Now why it was never rectified with a power increase to improve coverage, is beyond me. WVUE played the same hand and elected to move back to VHF and jumped back to its pre transition channel of 29 just a few weeks after complaints emerged of signal issues with VHF having moved back to channel 8 after the digital transition.

Sorry I know this post is long and it may come off as a techie TulaneLSU post of broadcast history.

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She’s the best!

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I'm honestly surprised she hasn't graduated to a bigger market yet. She must have the Cajun woman curse of not living too far from momma.