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Sub-Channels Over The Air
- Thread starter TVCOOL
- Start date
They'll be retooled, like TV Land is doing right now, but they won't disappear at all; the media companies would rather see them failing like HLN than being off the air completely. It'll take eight Suddenlink-sized companies telling Viacom to stick it before they'll even ditch VH1 Soul, for instance, and that's pretty much a VLC server on loop in Queens being fed to a satellite to apathy because they insert a new video maybe three times a month.
TCM of course, isn't going anywhere. Even with Get, This and Movies! out there, TCM is still commercial-free and respectful to the material they air, something I can't say about 'pan and scan commercial edit love affair' channels like Grit and Antenna at all.
K
K.M. Richards
Guest
Of course, the retooling is lost on viewers like myself who, finding they watch the broadcast subchannels more than 95% of the time, cancel the cable or the dish. This past Monday, I called DirecTV and told them, after 14 years of being their subscriber, it was no longer worth paying $700 a year for.
It might not work for everyone, but excluding a whole bunch of foreign language, religious, and home shopping channels which I never watch, here's what I get with the antenna:
* All the traditional broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CW) from O&Os, plus the all-rerun "networks" MyNet and ION.
* Two traditional English-language independents and one non-commercial indie (which also has the English-language feed of NHK on one of its subchannels).
* Two PBS stations, one of which also runs a feed called "PBS 2" on one subchannel and PBS World on another (the other is owned by the school district and uses its subchannels for instructional programming and WorldView).
* Classic television channels Antenna TV, Cozi, Decades, Laff, MeTV and Retro (plus the all-classic game show channel Buzzr).
* Movie channels This, Movies!, GetTV, Escape, Grit, and The Works. I'm not sure where to classify Bounce anymore as they moved all the reruns to daytime and are all-movies at night now.
30 channels. No monthly bill.
Of course, I must disclose that I live just under 25 miles away from Mount Wilson, from which virtually all broadcast television service -- excluding some LPTVs -- transmits, and I get great reception even though I am using the ancient antenna which is mounted in the attic of my apartment building. (I mean ancient as in it was already there when I moved in back in 1994, has not been replaced since, and no one at the property management company knows when it was originally installed. It might have been there when Newton Minow made his "vast wasteland" speech, for all I know.)
Everything TCM has in its library that I ever wanted to see was burned to DVD from the TiVo long ago.
So far as I know, none of these sub-channel networks could be characterized as "popular".
BounceTV, for example, scored a total day average of 174,000 in the first quarter 2015, 79,000 in A25-54. I didn't find any ratings summary for TV Land for 1Q2015, but they averaged 422,000 total viewers last week. TV Land is barely a top-25 cable network in viewership. BET is not a top-25 cabler.
BounceTV, for example, scored a total day average of 174,000 in the first quarter 2015, 79,000 in A25-54. I didn't find any ratings summary for TV Land for 1Q2015, but they averaged 422,000 total viewers last week. TV Land is barely a top-25 cable network in viewership. BET is not a top-25 cabler.
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