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Worst TV stations ever

inari said:
Sinclair just wanted to use KENV to launch TBD on satellite in the Salt Lake City tv market via must carry.
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I wouldn't have thought of that. But how are they able to get a signal from KENV to the satellite uplink centers in SLC? It's 200 miles as the crow flies from Elko to SLC.

Please tell me they don't use dedicated fiber. That would be a massive investment (or would it?) to place a diginet on satellite. What kind of ratings and viewership does TBD have anyway? Looking at their programming, it's just one step up from AMG TV.
 
I used to pick up the Central Virginia TV Guide at a convenience store located between my house and Chapel Hill. I have a map of TV Guide editions from 1978 and it shows Alamance County (next door to Chatham, where I live) getting the Central Virginia edition (Chatham got the North Carolina edition). The Triad and Triangle stations in the Central Virginia edition are all viewable in Alamance County, and I've gotten a decent signal for WDBJ and WSLS in Burlington.

About twenty years ago I spent the night in Beckley, WV, and all the Charleston/Huntington stations were carried there.

And re WYMT: some people call it "the little station that could," because everything about it was a disaster at one time and now does a decent job of covering southeastern Kentucky.
 
bpatrick said:
I used to pick up the Central Virginia TV Guide at a convenience store located between my house and Chapel Hill. I have a map of TV Guide editions from 1978 and it shows Alamance County (next door to Chatham, where I live) getting the Central Virginia edition (Chatham got the North Carolina edition). The Triad and Triangle stations in the Central Virginia edition are all viewable in Alamance County, and I've gotten a decent signal for WDBJ and WSLS in Burlington.

About twenty years ago I spent the night in Beckley, WV, and all the Charleston/Huntington stations were carried there.

And re WYMT: some people call it "the little station that could," because everything about it was a disaster at one time and now does a decent job of covering southeastern Kentucky.
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Indeed WYMT does. It's probably one of the finer small-town TV news operations in the US. Of course, they have WKYT's resources to draw upon, as well as Gray's, so it's not as though they're trying to do it all on their own. But they do an outstanding job, a real class act. WVVA in Bluefield WV, also Gray, is similarly excellent.

IIRC, in 2019 when I was there, only WSAZ and WCHS were carried on Beckley cable. If I had to guess, I would say that WVNS (Nexstar) has as part of their retransmission agreement "you can't carry WOWK, we want people in the BBOH market watching us and only us for CBS, and you also can't carry WVAH, as we want WVNS-59.2 to be the Fox station for this market as well, no competition". WOWK is also Nexstar, but I'd say they don't want their local product to suffer from people watching WOWK instead of WVNS, as would have been people's viewing habit prior to WVNS.

Just guessing, and assuming that local stations can make something like that part of their retransmission agreement.
 
bpatrick said:
I used to pick up the Central Virginia TV Guide at a convenience store located between my house and Chapel Hill. I have a map of TV Guide editions from 1978 and it shows Alamance County (next door to Chatham, where I live) getting the Central Virginia edition (Chatham got the North Carolina edition). The Triad and Triangle stations in the Central Virginia edition are all viewable in Alamance County, and I've gotten a decent signal for WDBJ and WSLS in Burlington.

About twenty years ago I spent the night in Beckley, WV, and all the Charleston/Huntington stations were carried there.

And re WYMT: some people call it "the little station that could," because everything about it was a disaster at one time and now does a decent job of covering southeastern Kentucky.
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The Central Virginia TVG had that weird little jut down between the Triad and Triangle markets, including Alamance County, which I'm assuming was to provide readers with listings for all major Triad, Triangle, and Roanoke stations. They also carried WSVA/WHSV from Harrisonburg, and their circulation area went up as far north as Pendleton County WV, where Roanoke 7/10 were carried on cable "back in the day" along with WSVA/WHSV. IIRC they later started selling the Eastern Virginia TVG, which also carried WHSV (but not Roanoke), and at one point they switched to the Washington-Baltimore edition. The clerk at the supermarket in Franklin told me they'd gotten several complaints about carrying the W-B TVG, as it didn't contain listings for WHSV. Viewers in Pendleton County consider WHSV to be their "local" station, though that huge mountain between Harrisonburg and Franklin makes traveling US 33 not for the faint of heart. Getting in the car and heading to Harrisonburg for a movie or to go to Walmart or Best Buy isn't just a matter of cruising a few miles into town on a smooth, flat highway on a moment's notice. Pendleton County is about as isolated as it is possible to be on the east coast of the United States. Petersburg in nearby Grant County is their "big city".
 
IM42A said:
The Central Virginia TVG had that weird little jut down between the Triad and Triangle markets, including Alamance County, which I'm assuming was to provide readers with listings for all major Triad, Triangle, and Roanoke stations. They also carried WSVA/WHSV from Harrisonburg, and their circulation area went up as far north as Pendleton County WV, where Roanoke 7/10 were carried on cable "back in the day" along with WSVA/WHSV. IIRC they later started selling the Eastern Virginia TVG, which also carried WHSV (but not Roanoke), and at one point they switched to the Washington-Baltimore edition. The clerk at the supermarket in Franklin told me they'd gotten several complaints about carrying the W-B TVG, as it didn't contain listings for WHSV. Viewers in Pendleton County consider WHSV to be their "local" station, though that huge mountain between Harrisonburg and Franklin makes traveling US 33 not for the faint of heart. Getting in the car and heading to Harrisonburg for a movie or to go to Walmart or Best Buy isn't just a matter of cruising a few miles into town on a smooth, flat highway on a moment's notice. Pendleton County is about as isolated as it is possible to be on the east coast of the United States. Petersburg in nearby Grant County is their "big city".
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The hour was up, so I couldn't edit this, but substituting Eastern Virginia for Central Virginia might have been to provide listings for WTTG and WDCA, as well as WVIR from Charlottesville, which might have had fringe reception in that area. Not sure whether the Central Virginia TVG carried WTTG and WDCA.
 
IM42A said:
The hour was up, so I couldn't edit this, but substituting Eastern Virginia for Central Virginia might have been to provide listings for WTTG and WDCA, as well as WVIR from Charlottesville, which might have had fringe reception in that area. Not sure whether the Central Virginia TVG carried WTTG and WDCA.
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The Central VA edition carried both WTTG and WDCA in the '80s. At some point in the mid-'90s, WTTG was dropped; I'll assume it was around the time channels 21 and 27 merged.
 
Rollo-Smokes said:
The Central VA edition carried both WTTG and WDCA in the '80s. At some point in the mid-'90s, WTTG was dropped; I'll assume it was around the time channels 21 and 27 merged.
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After Fox came into being, and stations in more and more cities along the East Coast became Fox affiliates, there was less and less of a reason for cable companies to carry WTTG. Being able to get news throughout the day from DC would have been about the only plus.

Also, markets such as Harrisonburg and Charlottesville, once the home of single stations affiliated with one network (or, in the case of WSVA in the early days, cherry-picking shows from various networks, relayed OTA from DC), eventually became full-network markets, by dint of adding subchannels, LPTVs, and in the case of Charlottesville, gaining a full-power primary CBS affiliate in WCAV. Digital TV with its subchannel capability has made getting a network affiliate from an adjacent market pretty much a thing of the past (but then there's Parkersburg WV which lacks ABC, for now at least, and Presque Isle ME which still gets ABC from Bangor). Gray's being able to snap up LPTVs and repurpose them into network affiliates, sister stations of their main properties, has helped too. They've got it down to a science.
 
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