Why Doesn't Every TV Station Use Subchannels?

[Gregg.]

Is there any reason why some TV stations are reluctant to offer subchannels? Why would a company have a blanket policy that it doesn't use subchannels? If you can run Antenna, Cozi or Me-TV or some other subchannel, why not? It's piggybacked on your primary channel for little additional expense, and I'm sure the operators of networks offered as subchannels require little or no compensation from the stations that carry the service. There's a thread below saying many stations that had been running Live Well will turn off their subchannel once that network goes off the air.

Some stations even use their subchannel for continuous re-broadcasts of their latest newscast, so if you missed the noon news at noon, you can see it at 3pm or whenever you'd like. I'm sure that also costs little. In the Portland ME market, the NBC and ABC stations both do that. I think the ABC affiliate even has their anchors do a five minute version, just for the subchannel. However, the Portland CBS affiliate owned by Sinclair, which had been running The Cool TV, a video music channel, did turn off their subchannel upon Cool TV's cancellation.

In NYC, Fox and Univision own two stations in the market. So in each case, they put the second station as a subchannel of the first station, and visa-versa. They do this in case you get better reception from one station instead of the other. Again, I'm not sure why more owners of two stations don't do this. My lakeside cottage in New Hampshire can get the the signals of Portland's ABC, NBC and CBS affiliates but not the other networks. Since some stations are co-owned, why not piggyback your Fox, My or CW affiliate, on a lesser tower, on your major network station? (In a few markets, stations are doing this and then turning off the second tower to save on expenses.)

I know some folks complain too many subchannels reduces the quality of the picture on your primary station. But would one in a hundred viewers notice the difference? I believe this was the reason CBS was against running subchannels on its O&O stations. A year or two ago, WCBS-TV NYC started running a news rebroadcast on a subchannel, while the last I checked, WBZ-TV Boston still had no subchannel. I really don't see the difference in picture quality myself.

 

[Avid Listener]

Does dividing your viewership help or hurt your ratings?

 

[Mediafrog+]

Does dividing your viewership help or hurt your ratings?

If you are making the argument of "why compete against yourself" then that is old fashioned thinking.

The goal is to have the largest part of the audience "pie." It doesn't matter how many slices your part of the pie is divided into, but how much of the overall pie you control, thus how much of the overall market revenue you receive. A good comparison are radio station groups in a market, where co-owned different formats with different demographic targets result in a broad appeal to advertisers.

Offering multiple subchannels helps hold an audience for OTA television. Limiting OTA choice just drives viewers to cable/satellite/internet competitors, and you miss out on that advertising revenue.

As for quality issues, most viewers don't notice the compression issues. Remember that people often watched crappy signals during the analog era and didn't think anything was wrong. It's only the true video geeks that see imperfections.

 

[Avid Listener]

If you are making the argument of "why compete against yourself" then that is old fashioned thinking.

I'm not making an argument. I'm asking a question. Can a station make more money by reducing their revenue from agency placed spots on high-rated network shows and making up for it with low-cost local spots sold on reruns of fifty year old black & white reruns of the Cisco Kid? I do not know the answer to that, which is why I am asking.

 

[PTBoardOp94]

The revenue you can glean from a subchannel is basically nothing because the audiences are tiny. We're talking Me-TV having less than 300,000 viewers in prime-time nationwide, and only 70,000 demo viewers.
In Jackson, TN? Probably a 0.0.

Part of the problem is cable carriage. Some cable and all DBS carriers do not carry subchannels, and if they do it's usually grouped with channels like IFC and C-SPAN.

Then you have the overhead costs. You have to have some amount of equipment to run a subchannel - automation to insert ads and IDs, at a minimum. You need someone to handle traffic and keep the promos for your main station up to date. You have to keep up with the rights to run the classic shows on Me-TV, because many of the shows are available in syndication to your competitors. If you bother trying to sell local spots, that's a huge opportunity cost for your sales staff.

Bottom line is that, while the costs aren't huge, you're still talking about a significant line item for the labor to keep a subchannel network on the air.

Now, for the specific case of running your duopoly programming on both signals, I have no explanation for that.

The goal is to have the largest part of the audience "pie." It doesn't matter how many slices your part of the pie is divided into, but how much of the overall pie you control, thus how much of the overall market revenue you receive. A good comparison are radio station groups in a market, where co-owned different formats with different demographic targets result in a broad appeal to advertisers.

I disagree. Because there is essentially no revenue available from your subchannels, so you specifically do not want people to stop watching ABC and watch Me-TV instead because that reduces ad rates on the ABC side without a similar gain on the Me-TV side.

 

[landtuna]

The revenue you can glean from a subchannel is basically nothing because the audiences are tiny. We're talking Me-TV having less than 300,000 viewers in prime-time nationwide, and only 70,000 demo viewers.

But what of the audience size outside prime-time? You would expect PT audience size to be tiny because the subchannel programming is in competition with first run network programs, specials and sports but outside prime-time the SC has mainly movies and old TV reruns (ala TVLand of old). Although the movies are not usually 'A' list a number of classic movies are run and along with some old TV favorites would seem to draw pretty well - especially since the rest of daytime TV is generally oriented towards females or just sucks in general with shows like Judge This or That and other junk.

The retired demo (yes, I know) probably makes up the majority of daytime viewing on subs and I would suspect it also gets a fair sized kiddie audience for safe, old TV shows like Dennis the Menace. The movies seem to be loaded towards Westerns. For me, it is lots of fun watching these old movies and seeing major stars when they were very young.

 

[anotherguyTN]

The revenue you can glean from a subchannel is basically nothing because the audiences are tiny. We're talking Me-TV having less than 300,000 viewers in prime-time nationwide, and only 70,000 demo viewers.
In Jackson, TN? Probably a 0.0.

If Me TV is getting a 0.0 in Jackson it's largely their own fault because they're only using Me TV for filler on their CBS subchannel instead of making it a full subchannel. Granted, putting CBS on subchannel was a good idea, but there's no reason that they can't drop 7.2 (which is nothing but a repeat of ABC programming on 7.1) and rearrange the bandwidth to allow them to carry Me TV as well except that they're too cheap to get off their wallets to make the changes to the bandwidth.

Because there is essentially no revenue available from your subchannels, so you specifically do not want people to stop watching ABC and watch Me-TV instead because that reduces ad rates on the ABC side without a similar gain on the Me-TV side.

It looks to me like that would depend on how much effort the station puts into it. I see a lot of Memphis area ads on Antenna TV, which comes from WREG in my area. And WBBJ could have more ads on their subchannels if they would make Me TV full time.

I agree with earlier posts that subchannel viewers for a station's subchannels amounts to a bigger piece of the pie. The times I watch Antenna TV are times that WREG or other stations don't have anything else I want to see. So if I watch something on Antenna it's still adding to WREG's overall viewer count. Actually I doubt that WBBJ gains that much more viewers on 7.3 with CBS except in areas where WREG or WTVF in Nashville aren't available. If I watch something on CBS I'm more likely to do that on WREG than WBBJ 7.3, which means fewer viewers for WBBJ overall. While if there was a time that I didn't want to watch anything from CBS or ABC, but if Me TV was available full time it would add to WBBJ's total viewers. But because they only run Me TV as filler they're actually hurting their overall total viewers.

 

[PTBoardOp94]

If Me TV is getting a 0.0 in Jackson it's largely their own fault because they're only using Me TV for filler on their CBS subchannel instead of making it a full subchannel.

In fact, being shared with CBS probably increases the viewership of Me-TV in Jackson. I don't actually have the market ratings for Jackson, it was a random market I picked out of the air. The point was that in order for Me-TV's ratings to be as bad as they are nationally, there will be numerous markets where literally no one is watching (from a Neilsen family).

It looks to me like that would depend on how much effort the station puts into it. I see a lot of Memphis area ads on Antenna TV, which comes from WREG in my area. And WBBJ could have more ads on their subchannels if they would make Me TV full time.

Again, the sales staff is wasting their time (= opportunity cost) if they're trying to sell ads on a sub-channel. Because subchannels have so few viewers, the ad rates fall substantially compared to your main network. You might be able to charge a used car dealer $60 for a slot during Judge Judy with demonstrated viewership of 15,000. The showing of Leave it to Beaver, with nearly immeasurable viewership might get $10. Or, quite possibly the ad time on the sub-channel is being "sold" as a free "value add" to the advertiser.

I agree with earlier posts that subchannel viewers for a station's subchannels amounts to a bigger piece of the pie. The times I watch Antenna TV are times that WREG or other stations don't have anything else I want to see. So if I watch something on Antenna it's still adding to WREG's overall viewer count.

This is a false equivalency. A viewer to Antenna TV is not as valuable as a viewer to WREG's CBS programming because of the ad rates.

 

[Mediafrog+]

Then you have the overhead costs. You have to have some amount of equipment to run a subchannel - automation to insert ads and IDs, at a minimum. You need someone to handle traffic and keep the promos for your main station up to date. You have to keep up with the rights to run the classic shows on Me-TV, because many of the shows are available in syndication to your competitors. If you bother trying to sell local spots, that's a huge opportunity cost for your sales staff.

Bottom line is that, while the costs aren't huge, you're still talking about a significant line item for the labor to keep a subchannel network on the air.

You are greatly overestimating what it takes to keep a subchannel on the air. It is basically the same automation model used by cable channels--satellite delivered programming with some local advertising avails. Cable systems have hundreds of such channels and manage just fine. At most local broadcast stations the subchannels are an afterthought, pretty much running on their own.

Automation/centralcasting/outsourcing/consolidation in today's broadcast business means that stations can be run with less and less staff, often in a different city perhaps hundreds of miles away. People in sales and traffic can oversee many different stations, and spots are often sold in combo across many different program streams. There really is no additional labor, nor is there any "opportunity cost" of running subchannels.

The cost of the actual automation equipment is not a big deal. In modern broadcast technology it often just involves using already existing equipment to its full potential. And adding a subchannel to the OTA signal just involves reprogramming the station's digital output encoder that sends program material to the transmitter.

Because there is essentially no revenue available from your subchannels, so you specifically do not want people to stop watching ABC and watch Me-TV instead because that reduces ad rates on the ABC side without a similar gain on the Me-TV side.

You are assuming that subchannels are going to directly steal viewers from your main channel, which is usually not the case. The goal is to bring in viewers who might be watching cable/satellite channels that are your competitors. I doubt that you will find any example anywhere of a subchannel reducing ad rates for a station's main channel...in fact the subchannel can be sold to advertisers as a "value added" proposition which would make the ad buy more attractive.

Bottom line is that OTA subchannels are pretty much the same as cable channels, other than their method of delivery.

 

[umfan]

I can't speak to how hard it is to keep a subchannel on, but I can validate Mediafrog's analysis as it pertains to me. Many nights, I'd just flip the tube off if Antenna TV weren't carried in my market. I even reconnected my aerial to pull it and other subchannels in more clearly. If not for the subchannel, there would be at least one less TV viewer watching.