channel2

How often do VNRs air? It seems like every now and then people manage to spot one and there's a big to-do about it...it makes me wonder how many get through without being noticed...

What do you mean?

Scripps seems to be run competently and have a vision beyond "don't get bought out," so... (The fact that the Scripps family owns the voting stock helps!)

I can’t help but wonder if Scripps and Gray and TEGNA and Nexstar are thankful to have their national assets around right now... Does Hubbard make a lot of money from Reelz and Ovation?

There's plenty of line-filled '70s logos I can point you to... It's not just a Star Wars thing. It's an era of design that designers have a lot of affection for.

General Tire paid a ton of bribes to foreign officials, and RKO General committed all kinds of fraud...so yeah, General Tire was shady as fuck. So is Sinclair, but from what we know, they can't really hide it as well (of course, it helped General Tire that this all happened before the Web became commonplace)...

From the sound of it, broadcast news people and cable news people don't tend to like each other very much.

I'm not clamoring for a sale. I just worry about what it would mean for the likes of KUSA if TEGNA ended up being sold to private equity and, likely, sold for parts. I am worried about TEGNA's direction as a whole, given that they seem to have no broader strategy than "not being bought out." I don't like standardization either, and I love Troika but find their TEGNA look to be a little bland and inflexible. But I have no idea who might do a better job running the group than the current TEGNA management. Sure as hell not private equity firms or hedge fund guys.

Given how uninspired and/or dire a lot of local TV logos have been the last 20 years or so, I'll take it.

Meanwhile, here I am noticing the fact that CBS used to own the Yankees...a family reunion of sorts!

There’s that war chest at work... And something more than just crumbs!

Sinclair is massively in debt. Something like $14 billion? Their financial statements are a bit opaque and confusing. Evidently they don't know how to do a leveraged buyout properly, since they didn't seem to put any of that debt onto Diamond. Not sure that would have been responsible per se, but it would have sheltered Sinclair proper from a lot of the seemingly-inevitable fallout.

Sinclair just doesn't have the leverage with MVPDs that Fox did. They don't have a Fox News or even an FX to use as a cudgel. WUCW is not KMSP-WFTC, for instance, and I don't know what kind of cachet the Tennis Channel has.

Or a banner, or a pennant...

They dropped the full name after Chris-Craft bailed, so "UPN" didn't stand for anything.

That was a holdover from the days before it became every conglomerate for themselves. What did UPN stand for starting in 2000?

He sold off 20th Century Fox, FX, and all that other stuff because he decided the streaming wars were one hurdle too many for him to clear. He's old and didn't seem to trust his kids to take the reins of 21CF as it was constituted. And, quite frankly, I think he saw that his trashy ethos didn't really jibe with the tone set by the likes of Netflix. From what I could tell, 20th and FX were low on his priority list anyway.

The RSNs are cable nets. Regulators had antitrust concerns over ESPN's already-dominant position in national sports rights, that adding the top RSN group to Disney's portfolio would have led to them wielding way too much power over MVPDs. I don't know how badly Disney really wanted the Fox movie operations. They bought them almost entirely for the film library, and they really wanted the TV division more, since ABC Studios wasn't as big as 20th TV.

I did notice that KCNC wasn't going to carry Circle in the run-up to its launch... I take it CBS is another station group that's stingy about subchannels? The diginets they own or have a stake in get the plum CBS O&O positions and everything else gets shuffled off to a duopoly partner if they have one (which KCNC doesn't)?

From what I remember, an earlier iteration of the Disney-Fox deal didn't include the RSNs, but Disney wanted them and they were added to the deal, adding about $22 billion to its value. I think a lot of the reason they went to Disney and were subsequently spun off was because Murdoch didn't want to lower the amount of Disney holdings he would receive, since the deal was originally all-stock and I believe he opted to take stock and not cash when the cash component was added. The Disney-Fox deal in general seems to have broken media.

Chris Ripley has, time and time again, demonstrated this company's delusions of grandeur and utter lack of any knowledge of its place in the media landscape, or the landscape itself, and this strikes me as no different. To hear it from Sinclair, you'd think they were a cross between the modern Disney and '90s Time Warner.

I mean, growth can be hard to come by when you’ve slammed head-first into the ownership cap.

Don't they still have the Disney ESPN money too? Money on top of money...

I wonder why there aren't more fans of the Indians or Rays feeling peeved? The Astros beat both of them in the postseason... (Then again, most MLB teams don't seem to have super-vocal fanbases)

The comic book illustrations are another effort to be cool, piggybacking off all the superhero movies and such...