Adam MadMan

Probably depends on who is able to get more stations on board to air the games. After all, the footprints of MLB teams are generally much larger than those of the NBA and MLB; they might even decide to stick to the ad hoc cable channel they set up after DSG dumped them, though with the Suns and Coyotes on OTA and the Cardinals generally airing cable games on OTA anyway per NFL rules, they'd be the only Big Four sports team to keep most of their games exclusive to pay TV if they went that route.

I think the only reason NBC shunted Days of our Lives to Peacock was to boost that service, anyway. Paramount+ isn't perfect, but it seems to not really need an aging soap opera to boost it up. That's what they took over Showtime for.

Not great for The CW, since it leaves the rest of Montana unaccounted for AFAIK, but I think I know what Scripps' endgame is. They recently bought the broadcast rights to the NHL's Vegas Golden Knights, and with The CW gone, I noticed they've turned those subchannels into independents. Since Montana is in the Golden Knights' territory, they're probably going to run the games on those channels.

The CW is airing the Miss USA pageant later this month.

Speaking of scheduling changes, they're swapping FBoy Island and the comedy night so that FBoy Island isn't competing with The Golden Bachelor. So instead, they're competing with Monday Night Football and Dancing with the Stars. Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire...

According to the Seattle Times, they're still running Comet during non-CW hours. Either that's a sign of the syndication market's inexorable decline, all the other stations taking all the decent programming, talks being really down to the wire, or just weapon's grade laziness on Sinclair's part.

I guess talks with Tegna fell apart. If I had to guess, it was because of the Atlanta situation. While Tegna did have KONG as leverage, Nexstar's relationship with Gray took precedence, hence WPCH being chosen over WATL, which probably led Tegna to take KONG off the market.

Well, prime time used to start at 7:30 before it was moved to 8 by the FCC over concerns that the Big 3 had too much power. They later got the 7 pm hour back on Sundays, but by the time the law was repealed for good, syndication companies had been making a mint on that real estate for two decades, and have kept the networks from taking that time back (outside of the few OTA networks that program more or less 24/7 like Ion). TL;DR, it's kinda prime time, but only officially on Sundays, because that's the only day of the week the networks program that hour.

It's certainly been theorized by a few outlets, given the Diamond Sports bankruptcy. I think their best bet for sports rights at the moment would be Pittsburgh. With Warner Bros. Discovery closing shop on their RSNs, the Pirates and Penguins need a new home. While it's been theorized that, since the Penguins are owned by the same guys as the Red Sox, they might move it to NESN, one of the few RSNs still doing reasonably well, but with several other teams going OTA, anything can happen.

Just out of curiosity, I looked up all of these URLs. At the moment, only boston38.com is currently active; it redirects to the Paramount Streaming division page on the Paramount Global website. The rest just send me to a page saying they're registered and protected.

Comet, Charge, Tennis Channel, and T2 will be added to Hulu in January 2024.

CBS changed its fall schedule to add various streaming series, as well as the linear return of SEAL Team and reruns of Yellowstone.

How long until RNN goes bankrupt itself?

Here's an odd bit of irony: iSpot says that while prime time is in the gutter, daytime TV, including syndication, is actually growing in terms of ad impressions and share of linear impressions.

Harry Jessel whines about the deal's death (can you tell I'm sick of reading this crap?).

Considering the sorry state of the Bally Sports networks, which air the Tampa Bay Rays and Lightning, I can imagine Nexstar hovering around like vultures hoping to get those rights if/when Diamond is forced to drop those, assuming CBS and WTOG don't beat them to it.

I think he was referring to the logo at the end. A pretty generic logo IMO, but that's apparently what they're going for this September. I expect the logos for the other seven stations to look more or less the same.

That aired on ABC, though.

And here comes the defense squad (a little too late, aren't we?).

Actually, that's an IndyCar docuseries, 100 Days to Indy. It was ordered as a miniseries to coincide with the buildup to the Indy 500, as the title suggest, and given the godawful ratings it's been getting, even for The CW, it might not even be here as part of the buildup for next year's Indy 500.

Kathy Feng of Common Cause has written a guest article about why the deal is a horrible thing for the industry.

If I had to guess, CBS wanted WADL to be run like an O&O, which Adell balked at. NBC tried a similar thing with KRON when Young Broadcasting bought it a few years later, and all that accomplished was costing NBC its longtime Bay Area affiliate, forcing them to buy KNTV, a longtime alternative ABC affiliate that was at this point sharing The WB with what was then KBWB (now KOFY). The only reason CBS bought WGPR in the first place was because, after Adell said no, they had literally no other options. WKBD, the lame duck Fox affiliate, was owned by Paramount, who wanted to reserve that station for UPN. They tried to get WXON to affiliate, but they demanded $200 million for a buyout, which CBS said no to; they ended up with The WB. WBSX, the eventual Pax/Ion station, was an HSN affiliate. And the remaining Big 3 affiliates, WXYZ and WDIV, were happy just as they were, the former in particular led to a deal with owner Scripps that led to another set of dominoes too numerous to list here.

It's not unprecedented. NBC shunted Days of our Lives to Peacock last year, so I can imagine the other networks may be thinking of doing the same to their remaining soaps. Any day now, I expect ABC to move General Hospital to Hulu and stick in another GMA spinoff, assuming they don't just hand the time slot back to the affiliates.

And the judge shot the Suns-Gray deal down. For now.

Given this little bit in the article... ...it sounds like a matter of when, not if. That said, when might not be for a while; KFMB's affiliation agreement doesn't end until 2026 according to files on the FCC's website.