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Report: Charter launching new Spectrum News channels


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I do wonder how this will work in Wisconsin.

 

My first thought: Assuming this is a news station with a statewide focus (given a nearly statewide reach for Spectrum), will viewers in, say, Rhinelander or Eau Claire or Wausau sit through stories from Madison and Milwaukee? Or vice versa?

 

Also, Milwaukee is a heavily newsed market, and Madison nearly as much. The two tactics Spectrum could take to try and compete: go big, or go cheap. Going big is expensive with no guaranteed return. Going cheap is what Sinclair did with NewsCentral, and they had their butts kicked up one side and down the other because everyone in Milwaukee could see what a ridiculously cheap operation it was. Again, assuming that this is a statewide news channel, I guess they could attract enough eyes in some underserved areas of the state, and whatever they get in the big markets like Milwaukee or Madison is just a bonus.

 

I would assume they'd have the obvious Fox Cities/Madison/Milwaukee news bases, but they'll probably also have some presence in Fond du Lac (where they have their 2nd major base in the state) and Eau Claire. All they have to do honestly, is be much better than Gannett has in covering news for the state, which is pretty easy (ever since the Journal Sentinel purchase you might as well have thrown the other 11 state newspapers into the JS as a supplement for each market, as they all have gone quickly downhill).

 

The good thing is they also have an easy template in the failure of Journal ten years back to try to 'bureau-ize' WGBA; WTMJ's attempts to put their newscasts in Green Bay failed as bad as News Central did. You won't see the standard Milwaukee crime roll on a Spectrum WI channel; the worst crimes will get attention, but the fender benders and 'DUI dashcam laziness' aren't getting near them. Best I see is that you get your standard weather on the 1's/3's, sports mid-hour, features before the half hour and then the hour otherwise is divided into specific regions to give coverage to everything (top of the hour for SE, second segment NE, third SW and fourth NW), along with your standard Spectrum News Madison political show in primetime (though I'm surprised they haven't bought a stake in WisconsinEye yet), and of course, the sports remains (but any infomercials are dead now).

 

Also note that Spectrum never launched SportsNet on their Charter WI systems, even after the acquisition; they will easily have channel spaces to launch since they've cleared out most of the 'other market' OTA channels as contracts expired/networks stopped allowing replication (ABC being an exception), so we'll see if it gets a universal channel in Wisconsin, but it won't be 32 like Spectrum Sports had, most likely.

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The North Carolina Spectrum News (née TWC News14 Carolina) runs a different feed for each market, but it’s all anchored out of the same studio in Charlotte I believe. They do have local stories relevant to each region, plus localized weather and traffic.

 

Don’t see any reason why they couldn’t do something similar in Wisconsin.

 

I think NC’s is based in Raleigh.

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[ATTACH=full]6374[/ATTACH]

God do I miss them computer fairs. Off-topic but it had to be said.

 

I don't know how they're going to launch the Spectrum News channel in LA but it'd be sad to see SportsNet go. I could care less for SportsNet LA since it's unnecessary and only shows one team.

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God do I miss them computer fairs. Off-topic but it had to be said.

 

I don't know how they're going to launch the Spectrum News channel in LA but it'd be sad to see SportsNet go. I could care less for SportsNet LA since it's unnecessary and only shows one team.

 

Honestly, they need to merge the two, but the Dodgers own SportsNet LA, so I doubt that will happen.

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The SoCal channel has their team for their morning newscast named "The Beat on 1" with former Good Morning America anchor Lisa McRee and former CBS/NBC News anchor Giselle Fernández. The new network hasn't been revealed yet.

https://newsroom.charter.com/press-releases/spectrum-networks-announces-morning-news-team-and-primetime-programming-for-southern-californias-new-24-7-news-channel/

 

Here's part of the SoCal's news studio:

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And for anyone who didn't actually link through to that article: they say that LA will launch in November.

 

They also say that they "will expand to Kentucky, Ohio, and Wisconsin this fall." That heavily implies, but doesn't outright say, that they'll launch this fall.

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It would be nice to see something like this in DFW. I would say "all of TX" but Spectrum would have to be the big kahuna cable provider in all the major state metros for that to be the case. Most of the small-to-medium metros have SuddenLink/Altice, and Houston has Comcrap so I don't know how Spectrum would feel about having a news channel presence in the state.

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It would be nice to see something like this in DFW. I would say "all of TX" but Spectrum would have to be the big kahuna cable provider in all the major state metros for that to be the case. Most of the small-to-medium metros have SuddenLink/Altice, and Houston has Comcrap so I don't know how Spectrum would feel about having a news channel presence in the state.

 

Belo (Gannett/Tegna) lauched TXCN (Texas Cable News) in 1999. It lasted about 15 years and was meant to be a statewide cable network. However, they couldn’t get on some of the big systems where they needed to be. Since no single cable company has all of Texas, and since the odds of any cable system carrying another’s state news channel are tiny, there doesn’t seem to be a good reason for anyone to try it again anytime soon.

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and since the odds of any cable system carrying another’s state news channel are tiny, there doesn’t seem to be a good reason for anyone to try it again anytime soon.

 

Well in the case of Los Angeles maybe if Spectrum Sports dangled a few Dodger games over the heads of ATT and Dish ,etc...

 

Ya catching my drift?

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Belo (Gannett/Tegna) lauched TXCN (Texas Cable News) in 1999. It lasted about 15 years and was meant to be a statewide cable network. However, they couldn’t get on some of the big systems where they needed to be. Since no single cable company has all of Texas, and since the odds of any cable system carrying another’s state news channel are tiny, there doesn’t seem to be a good reason for anyone to try it again anytime soon.

 

I suppose TEGNA could try to launch a Texas news channel again sometime in the future seeing the death grip they have on Texas.

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The SoCal channel has their team for their morning newscast named "The Beat on 1" with former Good Morning America anchor Lisa McRee and former CBS/NBC News anchor Giselle Fernández. The new network hasn't been revealed yet.

https://newsroom.charter.com/press-releases/spectrum-networks-announces-morning-news-team-and-primetime-programming-for-southern-californias-new-24-7-news-channel/

 

Here's part of the SoCal's news studio:

The loser and has been channel. The Beat was a highly rated radio station in the 90's and early 2000's in L.A. (and briefly used at current radio station 93.5 KDAY a few years back). I wouldn't use it as part of the name of a newscast. It doesn't say newscast to me.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Because it's going to be on Channel 1...and when we turn on our Spectrum cable boxes it will automatically turn to their crap channel.

 

That feature has been killed over time and even if it's still there, you can change the channel it boots on in the menus (and most people just leave their box on anyways so it's a true 'only 10% issue'). I guess this means that hopefully, finally they're killing the dumb Time Warner model of each VOD service being on a 'channel' ('watch HBO On Demand on channel 400' for instance) and you have to needlessly go past/delete channels without content.

 

The Beat was a highly rated radio station in the 90's and early 2000's in L.A. (and briefly used at current radio station 93.5 KDAY a few years back). I wouldn't use it as part of the name of a newscast.

 

It's a television news show, and it's highly doubtful anyone outside a few is going to cry 'RE-USE!' about a dead radio branding (or its other use, a UPN cop show only remembered for getting low UPN cop show ratings and buying Mark Ruffalo a house).

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Article on the Spectrum News Wisconsin channel:

https://www.bizjournals.com/milwaukee/news/2018/10/18/spectrum-cable-to-launch-local-news-channel-for.html

 

Nothing really new contained in here, other than speculation that the Wisconsin channel will debut by December. They also confirm that it will indeed replace the local Spectrum Sports channel and subsume some of its programming.

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Other providers in Wisconsin and Florida should start their own local News Channel and allow Sprectrum put it in their Lineups. Also make News Channels like RSN's. Comcast can do one"

 

For one thing, Spectrum is creating one in Wisconsin: Spectrum News Wisconsin

 

And for another thing, Spectrum can create local news channels in Florida since they have cable systems there. Its called Bay News 9 and News 13. Been around for 20 years now, heard of them? (I know I sound sarcastic)

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Other providers in Wisconsin and Florida should start their own local News Channel and allow Sprectrum put it in their Lineups. Also make News Channels like RSN's. Comcast can do one"

 

As Spectrum is the main provider in WI and AT&T's state presence since the DirecTV buy nullified U-verse can be described as 'existing', this would be wildly inefficient. Right now, Spectrum is dominant in Wisconsin, Comcast has one system in Manitowoc which should have been sold years ago but seems to be maintained solely for trademark reasons/dibs, and TDS is the sole non-Dish/U-verse competitor. You get past that and it's a whole lot of disparate municipal cable companies with little to no leverage or connection.

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Former Memphis meteorologist Andrew Kozak announced yesterday on social that he will be the evening weathercaster for Spectrum News Ohio, which will be based in Columbus and broadcast statewide. Debuts in November.

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  • 2 weeks later...

It finally happened, Spectrum finally did something with Spectrum News Kentucky. It appears to have relaunched as Spectrum News 1 earlier this week, dumped the offsite weather forecasts and looks like it's attempting to create a serviceable regional news network (albeit one that serves the metro areas and their suburbs. The state capital won't even receive this channel.)

 

Everything appears to be based in Louisville, though there's at least one different feed for the western portion of the state as evidenced by the time card at the top of the hour quickly flickering from 11 to 10 (and the website is broken up into Bowling Green, Louisville, Lexington, and Northern Kentucky). They're trying to keep some semblance of continuity with the old all-weather-all-the-time format with the attempt at a radar insert (yikes) and forecasts in lieu of a ticker. In addition, they're moving the channel from the legacy channel 2 (from when it was "Community Network" on Insight...cn|2) to channel 1, though I think Spectrum's keeping both channels 1 and 2 for at least a month.

 

EDIT: It also appears possible to watch any of the four feeds (Louisville, Lexington, Bowling Green, Northern Kentucky) online. The only differences appear to be the weather information (temp bug, crawl and Weather on the 1s inserts).

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Former Memphis meteorologist Andrew Kozak announced yesterday on social that he will be the evening weathercaster for Spectrum News Ohio, which will be based in Columbus and broadcast statewide. Debuts in November.

Update to the situation at Spectrum News 1 Ohio: By that same source, those of us in Ohio who have Spectrum will see the channel hit the airwaves this Wednesday! More on that here:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DrRGdrwWkAEDXYi.jpg:large

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