caliwxdude

Yeah, it's pretty bad. Thought Sinclair might have opened up the budget for a station in a rapidly-growing market like Austin, but money is tight across the board these days. To be fair, it does shoot a bit nicer than the wide-angle pics posted upthread—but it's still super boring and uninspired. Makes me wonder what else they did in the five months they were in the makeshift studio since there's no way this took that long to assemble. I'm sure CBS/Paramount wishes they could go back to 2007 and have hung on to the station (I wish I would have bought my house here back in 2007, too), but it was a much different landscape both in local TV and in Austin back then.

KEYE morning anchor tweets that today was their last morning in the temporary studio, so it would seem like the new set debuts during the 5:00pm show today.

Ah yeah, I forgot this was part of a greater remodeling project on the building. As someone who's currently scoping out some home renovation projects, totally get how the dependencies and phasing work! Looking forward to seeing how all the work turned out.

Curious what's going on over at KXAN. They're still using the temporary studio, going on a full month after the new set's cameo during the Austin mayoral runoff debate. Guess now they're just waiting for the February book before moving in?

Yes, that's what they're doing, titled "KCAL News on CBS Los Angeles." The primetime news on KCAL remains: KCAL and KCBS have always been one news operation since 2003, but with separate on-air brands (visual identities were basically the same). So nothing has changed with who "produces" the news, but now it's just all unified under the KCAL News brand.

Ugh, I saw this too and was afraid this might be the case. Not sure why they didn't just put "Afternoon Edition" or "Evening Edition" in there, but guessing it's a hard-coded element that can't be easily changed on the fly. It's a total waste and looks terrible. This graphics package is highly templatized, and every other O&O will have the "CBS News [City]" lockup in that blue rectangle, a la KPIX. But since the CBS LA duo wanted to do their own thing and adopt the "KCAL News Los Angeles" brand, they had to put something in that spot. Creative director: "...so that blue box can't go away? Should we just stick 'LOS ANGELES' there?" Designer: "Yeah, sure, that'll work. Done."

Home of Disney's Digital Center 3, where ABC network feeds originate and MC for the ABC O&O group.

If they're producing promos for a "new KCAL" with the existing KCAL9 lockup, doesn't seem like they're moving away from the KCAL9 brand anytime soon. Also who launches new stuff on a Thursday?

Just adding in that it's a really nice rebrand. The overall downturn in local TV news has hit KPIX especially hard over the last few years, and the product has really fallen into the cellar of the Bay Area market. Yeah we'll miss the old Group W-style 5 (however it was starting to look really old), but I can't tell you the last time I used the channel number buttons on my remote now that almost all of my linear TV viewing is via streaming services. All in all a nice step up for PIX.

KFSN is the farm league for ABC's O&O group, so they don't get a ton of budget to play with. The last set was nearly 16 years old and only received a minor update for the station's HD conversion.

Awesome to see the great Ian Darke back calling World Cup games on US TV. Missed him for the 2018 World Cup coverage, glad Fox was able to pick him up for 2022. Now I just hope we get to hear more of the Pete Calandra soccer theme that Fox inexplicably shelved for the boring and uninspiring custom composition they used in 2018.

Gus Johnson was the biggest loss, IMO. Wish there was a way for CBS/Turner to bring him back just for March Madness coverage. Still going to be weird not hearing Nantz call the Final Four and championship games, but it makes sense. Fascinating how sports TV is turning over to the next generation over the past year, with new play by play voices in the lead spots for most networks. Ian Eagle is great (as is his kid Noah) and he'll be a solid lead PxP voice for CBS moving forward. I'm sure he's being groomed as the replacement for Nantz in the NFL lead booth at some point down the line too.

100%. I'm sure Bristol isn't too worried about things since MNF will still be a ratings juggernaut, but gotta wonder how they're going to compete in the overall production department with this. I'll stream TNF for Al Michaels... Joe Buck, not so much.

More than just the scorebug... the entire show is basically NBC Sunday Night Football on Thursday on Prime. Which is a really good thing for both football fans and the NFL—it uplevels the entire Thursday night game package into something that you'd want to watch week after week, instead of being an afterthought like it was in the Fox/NFL Network eras. The matchups were always crap in those days, and the production matched in quality. I'm sure the Fred Gaudelli/Al Michaels combo has a lot to do with the increase in overall quality, but also I thought Kirk Herbstreit was really great in his first true NFL role. Al makes it look easy, but he and Kirk already had great booth chemistry from the opening minutes of their first game. New music is awesome, too. The matchups still might stink, but at least the TV will be great.

The bones of this set look exactly like their old KUSA hand me down set, which FX zhuzhed up when they went HD in 2008. It looks like they're also retooling their presentation style by moving out of the "content center" and back into the studio. I haven't watched a full KXTV show since last November, but they were mostly single-anchored shows from a standup desk in the newsroom. Seems like this would signal a return to a more traditional dual-anchor style broadcast.

It's likely a glitch on the DirecTV side. Back in the early pre-spot beam era of DirecTV local channels, you'd occasionally see random out of market affiliates unblocked for a couple hours at a time due to a software glitch. From the late 1990s onward, DirecTV distant network services were always either from New York or Los Angeles. The Denver thing stems from the old old days when stations in that market were available free to air to C-band satellite users and part of the Primetime24 subscription service.

These broadcasts are almost always produced by the teams themselves, not the stations airing the games, so you'll see some varying levels of production quality. Then there's some barter/ad revenue sharing going on in terms of securing airtime on KBCW. Interestingly it looks like former KPIX/current freelance KTVU weather anchor Roberta Gonzales is also doing PR for the Panthers. Whoever made the decision to wear all-black unis on a black turf surface though... yikes. Took me a minute to realize there was more than one team out there.

Tucked away in some cabinet at my parents house is a stack of 35mm film photos of me sitting on this set in 1997 when I was a 9 year old obsessed with TV weather. Got to hang with then-weekend met Jon Slater for the afternoon and 5pm news. Good memories.

Looks like Kansas City at New Orleans in 2020 Week 15 went to every market except Phoenix, since the Cards were at home against the Eagles. https://506sports.com/nfl.php?yr=2020&wk=15 EDIT: Looking back at the 506 Sports archives and it happened quite a bit last season. Week 6 Packers/Bucs was a 100% national game on Fox Sunday afternoon. Happened a few times pre-covid too.

Such a missed opportunity to have implemented the Rhombus 7. Boring. Bland.

Looks like this monstrosity. Makes you wonder what process goes into design decisions like this...

Doubtful. The numbers for college football aren't the same as NFL, so it doesn't make sense to cannibalize ESPN's viewership to show it for free on ABC.

99% of stations don't own the choppers, they lease them (or have other sharing agreements) from helicopter operators that provide the maintenance, pilots and photographers. Helicopters Inc. is one of the main players in the US ENG market—in the SF Bay Area for example, they own/operate all helicopters. These days only KTVU's N62TV and KGO's N7QY carry station branding but the feeds are shared among all affiliates in the market. They also have a couple generic birds based at the Hayward airport—for example, N42SL (KTRK's former chopper before Helicopters Inc. upgraded them to a next-gen Bell 505/JetRanger X) flies around occasionally and shares video among everyone in the market. AFAIK, these contracts are usually billed hourly. Here's another example: SKY Helicopters provides aerial coverage for Dallas/Ft. Worth stations with a couple Robinson R44 Newscopters based out of their own facility in Garland, TX. They list aerial videography at $1750/hour (all in), so that should give you a baseline price for the R44, which is among the cheapest helicopters to operate. I'm sure the station groups have negotiated something cheaper. The only stations I know of that actually own helicopters outright are Griffin's N9TV at KWTV in Oklahoma City and N196TV at KOTV in Tulsa. Griffin built a heliport/hangar for N196TV at KOTV's new(ish) facilities in downtown Tulsa, but it seems like the chopper is based at Jones-Riverside Airport in South Tulsa these days.

Wonder if this means NFLN will be going it alone on game production once again?

Watching the 5pm show now and the lighting on Allen Martin's OTS shot is terrible. It's almost as if there's too much white in the background (a curious design decision—this is TV after all) and so they're shading down the cameras to compensate... and then darkening the talent. They're still splitting co-anchors between the studio and CBSN set in the newsroom, so there's a huge disparity between the two shots. Gross. Weather area looks a bit better, but needs some balancing (sorry for the bad screen grab, Liz): Editing to add another shot – it's VERY white. Probably the source of the lighting problems. Slightly better from the straight-on camera, but it's still pretty dark.