Sinclair Thread incl. Tribune Merger

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supersonic
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Sinclair Thread incl. Tribune Merger

Post by supersonic »

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Re: NY Post: SBG close to buying all Tribune TV stations

Post by TYFDK »

Tribune owns stations in NYC, Cleveland, and Los Angeles. Would be great if all those stations got ROH.
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Re: NY Post: SBG close to buying all Tribune TV stations

Post by famicommander »

TYFDK wrote:Tribune owns stations in NYC, Cleveland, and Los Angeles. Would be great if all those stations got ROH.
They own way more than that:
WGN
part of Food Network
Huntsville – Decatur (CBS)
Fort Smith – Fayetteville (CBS and MyNetworkTV)
Los Angeles (The CW)
Sacramento – Stockton – Modesto (Fox)
San Diego (Fox)
Denver (The CW and Fox)
Fort Collins (Fox)
Hartford – New Haven (Fox)
Waterbury, Connecticut (The CW)
Washington, D.C. (The CW)
Miami – Fort Lauderdale (The CW)
Chicago (WGN-TV)
Moline, Illinois (Quad Cities) (ABC)
Bloomington (CBS)
Indianapolis (Fox)
Kokomo (CBS)
Des Moines (NBC)
New Orleans (ABC and The CW)
Grand Rapids – Battle Creek - Kalamazoo (Fox)
Kansas City, Missouri (Fox)
St. Louis (Fox and The CW)
New York City (The CW)
High Point – Greensboro - Winston-Salem (Fox)
Cleveland – Akron (Fox)
Oklahoma City (NBC and an Independent)
Salem – Portland, OR (The CW)
Philadelphia (MyNetworkTV)
Scranton – Wilkes Barre (ABC)
York – Harrisburg -Lancaster – Lebanon (Fox)
Memphis (CBS)
Dallas – Fort Worth (The CW)
Houston (The CW)
Salt Lake City (Fox)
Norfolk – Portsmouth (CBS and The CW)
Richmond (CBS)
Tacoma – Seattle (Fox and MyNetworkTV)
Milwaukee (Fox)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribune_B ... n_stations

That's a lot of new markets and a lot of markets where the show is currently only on a digital subchannel like Comet, ThisTV, or MeTV
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Re: NY Post: SBG close to buying all Tribune TV stations

Post by Wilson »

Unless this action eats into ROH's budget, I imagine this is very good for the product. Personally, I get creeped out with any big media merger/acquisition/de-regulative exploitation but hey.
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Re: NY Post: SBG close to buying all Tribune TV stations

Post by The Dragon Saga »

Took them long enough.

Best thing to come from this is that the channel gets picked up by various networks which gives ROH the cable exposure Joe Koff has said he wants next.
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Re: NY Post: SBG close to buying all Tribune TV stations

Post by supersonic »

Observer:
Regarding the Sinclair purchase of the Tribune TV stations, which in theory would give ROH syndication in some of the biggest markets, FOX and Blackstone Group LP have put in a bid to Tribune to purchase the stations. The FCC has changed regulations that were in place from previous administrations trying to prevent giant media conglomerates from controlling so much of the market. The old regulation is that no conglomerate could have stations in more than 39 percent of the homes in the country. To get around that, they are now counting UHF stations as half, so if you have a UHF station in a 2 million person market, it now counts as 1 million
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Re: NY Post: SBG close to buying all Tribune TV stations

Post by famicommander »

Done deal.

Now to wait and see how this affects ROH.

Presumably all of the Tribune stations will air ROH TV, but what about WGN America? They've aired WWE programming in the past.
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Re: NY Post: SBG close to buying all Tribune TV stations

Post by famicommander »

The effort make WGN America a platform for pricey original programming is over, Sinclair Broadcast CEO Chris Ripley told analysts today in a call to discuss his company’s $3.9 billion deal to buy Tribune Media.

WGNA “is already going to be shifting its strategy away from high cost originals into more cost effective originals and reruns” now that Peter Kern is interim CEO of Tribune — replacing Peter Liguori, who left the company in March — Ripley says.

“We think that is the right path for WGNA,” the Sinclair chief adds. “WGNA doesn’t have a revenue problem. It’s got a nice contractual ramp up of affiliate fees over the next couple of years, and a nice base of advertising revenue.”

But the ratings don’t “justify the type of spending that they do on the original programming side,” he says. ” We believe quite firmly that that channel could be run much more profitably just racking a fraction of what they spend on programming and return that to station profitability.”
http://deadline.com/2017/05/wgn-america ... 202086763/

This sounds pretty good for ROH's chances. Sounds like Sinclair wants to keep WGN and move it to low-cost programming.

Considering Sinclair already owns ROH and is already producing the TV show, the cost for WGN to air ROH TV would be essentially zero.
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Re: NY Post: SBG close to buying all Tribune TV stations

Post by supersonic »

So zero chance of high-brow programming to compete against the likes of Game of Thrones and Better Call Saul?
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Re: NY Post: SBG close to buying all Tribune TV stations

Post by famicommander »

supersonic wrote:So zero chance of high-brow programming to compete against the likes of Game of Thrones and Better Call Saul?
Are you implying that wrasslin' is low brow entertainment?

Well, I never!
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Re: NY Post: SBG close to buying all Tribune TV stations

Post by famicommander »

It seems Tribune also owns Antenna TV and 50% of ThisTV, in addition to all the stations listed above.

They're both tiny digital subchannels like Comet, but they do have wide availability
Antenna TV is available in 87% of homes in the US
ThisTV is available in 83% of homes in the US
Comet is available in 72% of homes in the US
WGN is available in 63% of homes in the US

And Sinclair is about to own them all.

If all four of them were to air ROH, in addition to all the other Sinclair and Tribune stations, there'd be virtually nobody in the US that couldn't see ROH's product on television, to say nothing of all the streaming options.
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Re: NY Post: SBG close to buying all Tribune TV stations

Post by cgstong »

This could be something big for ROH and it could not. As Dylan Waco said on the Newscast and I agree, it will show how seriously SBG takes ROH.
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Re: NY Post: SBG close to buying all Tribune TV stations

Post by supersonic »

Observer:
The $3.9 billion deal where Sinclair has purchased Tribune Media Company and its 42 local television stations, making Sinclair the largest ownership group of television stations in the country is a big deal to ROH. You’d almost say a game changer, except the reality is that ROH really isn’t drawing dependent on television in the sense it’s a lot like indie wrestling in that it’s word-of-mouth and Internet buzz and not really television created interest. We don’t know for certain that ROH will be added to all the new stations, but in the past, ROH has been added to all Sinclair purchases. The key to the deal is that it gives Sinclair, and perhaps ROH, local television coverage in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Sacramento, San Diego, Denver, Washington, D.C., Miami, Indianapolis, New Orleans, Kansas City, St. Louis, Greensboro, Philadelphia, Dallas and Houston. Many of these are strong stations such as KTLA in Los Angeles, WGN in Chicago, WPIX in New York and KPLR in St. Louis. The deal also includes the WGN America cable station, which they are going to revamp and make more cost-effective (basically they are going to cut greatly the production of original programming). Also of note is that, while it’s so far back that it really doesn’t matter, but if ROH gets on, they will be on stations that were big-time wrestling stations during the regional wrestling heyday including WGNO in New Orleans (Mid South Wrestling), WSFL in Miami (Championship Wrestling from Florida), KTXL in Sacramento (Big Time Wrestling), KPLR in St. Louis (Wrestling at the Chase), and KTAH in Houston (Houston Wrestling). Regarding the sale, Joe Koff said, “It’s early in the process but the potential is tremendous as you think about the acquired assets for program distribution, but as you can imagine, a little premature for anything but speculation.” Sinclair also assumed $2.7 billion in debt
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Re: NY Post: SBG close to buying all Tribune TV stations

Post by famicommander »

Even if Sinclair doesn't take ROH "seriously" they still need cheap content for all the TV stations they just bought. ROH is about as cheap as it gets and it's one of the only things Sinclair owns that produces fresh content that they don't have to pay a license fee for.

I think that ROH TV going to all the new broadcast stations is a foregone conclusion.

What remains to be seen is whether or not the national feeds Sinclair just bought (WGN, ThisTV, Antenna TV) will air ROH.
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Re: NY Post: SBG close to buying all Tribune TV stations

Post by Wilson »

Sinclair getting that much pined-for John Oliver top story coverage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvtNyOzGogc
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Re: NY Post: SBG close to buying all Tribune TV stations

Post by Wilson »

Use of a regulatory loophole will allow Sinclair to reach 72 percent of U.S. households after buying Tribune’s stations.

By MARGARET HARDING MCGILL and JOHN HENDEL

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/0 ... ion-241337
Sinclair Broadcast Group is expanding its conservative-leaning television empire into nearly three-quarters of American households — but its aggressive takeover of the airwaves wouldn’t have been possible without help from President Donald Trump's chief at the Federal Communications Commission.

Sinclair, already the nation’s largest TV broadcaster, plans to buy 42 stations from Tribune Media in cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, on top of the more than 170 stations it already owns. It got a critical assist this spring from Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, who revived a decades-old regulatory loophole that will keep Sinclair from vastly exceeding federal limits on media ownership.

The change will allow Sinclair — a company known for injecting "must run" conservative segments into its local programming — to reach 72 percent of U.S. households after buying Tribune’s stations. That’s nearly double the congressionally imposed nationwide audience cap of 39 percent.

The FCC and the company both say the agency wasn’t giving Sinclair any special favors by reviving the loophole, known as the “UHF discount,” which has long been considered technologically obsolete. But the Tribune deal would not have been viable if not for Pai’s intervention: Sinclair already reaches an estimated 38 percent of U.S. households without the discount, leaving it almost no room for growth.

The loophole is a throwback to the days when the ultra-high-frequency TV spectrum — the part higher than Channel 13 — was filled with low-budget stations with often-scratchy reception over analog rabbit ears. That quality gap no longer exists in today's world of digital television, but under the policy that Pai revived, the commission does not fully count those stations’ market size when tallying a broadcaster's national reach.

[. . .]


The Washington Post in December reported that Sinclair "gave a disproportionate amount of neutral or favorable coverage to Trump during the campaign" while airing negative stories on Hillary Clinton. That followed POLITICO's reporting on a boast by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner that the president's campaign had struck a deal with the broadcast group for better media coverage. (Sinclair disputed the characterization, saying it was an arrangement for extended sit-down interviews that was offered to both candidates.) In April, Sinclair hired former White House aide Boris Epshteyn, who had organized Trump's TV surrogates, as an on-air political analyst.

Controversy over Sinclair's politics predates Trump. The broadcaster came under fire in 2004 over reports it planned to air a documentary critical of then-Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's Vietnam-era antiwar activism, though the company instead aired a news special on some stations rather than the full documentary. But the company's bid to get bigger via the Tribune deal has focused new attention on the company.

[. . .]

On Pai's first week on the job as chairman in late January, Sinclair urged the agency to reinstate the UHF discount, which allows ultra-high-frequency stations to count for only half their actual audience when calculating their national reach. Pai had dissented when the FCC’s then-Democratic majority abolished the discount in 2016, arguing that the commission should also review and adjust the national ownership cap.

Once installed as head of the agency, Pai brought back the discount in a 2-1 party-line vote in April over the objections of Clyburn, who pointed out the irony that a chairman who has emphasized slashing outmoded regulations was reviving a "relic of a bygone era." A little over two weeks after the FCC vote, Sinclair announced its acquisition of Tribune Media.

[. . .]

The FCC chairman has further proposed eliminating a rule that requires each TV station to have a main studio in or near the community it serves, arguing that modern technology allows community interaction without an in-person visit to a local studio. Critics charge that's another handout to Sinclair, with Wheeler warning in a July blog post that "Sinclair — long known for requiring their stations to carry right-wing programs produced by headquarters — will have an open field to replace local voices with national control."

With the regulatory path eased for its Tribune transaction, Sinclair is looking at relatively smooth sailing in GOP-dominated Washington. Ripley, the CEO, has expressed confidence the deal will receive regulatory approval from the FCC and the Justice Department, while acknowledging that the company might still have to drop some TV stations in select markets to fully adhere to ownership rules.

Sinclair isn't showing signs of massively boosting its bare-bones lobbying operation in Washington, though it's increasing its investment. The company spent roughly $60,000 on lobbying in the first half of this year, nearly the amount it spent in all of 2016, and recently brought back a second, in-house lobbyist who previously lobbied for the broadcaster. One of the lobbyists, Hanson, has mostly focused on tamping down any Democratic opposition in Congress.

[. . .]

More opposition could emerge during the regulatory review process. Public interest group Public Knowledge, the American Cable Association and DISH Network urged the FCC to slow down the review process and make Sinclair release more information about how the deal will benefit the public. Conservative website Newsmax — a potential competitor to Sinclair in the right-wing news business — also told the FCC that the deal raises "serious competitive concerns" in a filing supporting the request for more time and information. The FCC denied the requests.
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Re: SBG close to buying all Tribune TV stations

Post by Laviemarg »

I don't understand why Sinclair didn't cool it with the Boris' segments and such. If you are going to be biased, don't rub it in people's faces before the FCC approves your merger.
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Re: SBG close to buying all Tribune TV stations

Post by The Dragon Saga »

So long as they put ROH on the air, I - mostly as a foreigner, apologies to the American contingent on the forum - could care less about the politics of the situation.
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