On a personal note, I could throw in their sidecars but at the end of the day i could see some sniffing at Gray, Tegna, Hearst, or Byron Allen since they're below the 39 percent FCC cap. So bye bye Trump propaganda on a local scale.
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Sinclair looks to sell 30 percent of their TV stations and the Tennis Channel
- Thread starter DarrenVision
- Start date
On a personal note, I could throw in their sidecars but at the end of the day i could see some sniffing at Gray, Tegna, Hearst, or Byron Allen since they're below the 39 percent FCC cap. So bye bye Trump propaganda on a local scale.
From the linked article:
We've seen the same thing with radio companies. There's no value in owning a declining asset. As a company, they've done nothing to enhance or grow that asset. They haven't merchandised it well in ways to enhance value. So they might as well sell. We're seeing other TV groups in a similar situation, including CBS (through Paramount Global) or ABC through Disney. There are fewer buyers and more sellers. Thats always a bad sign. What it mainly leaves are the investment companies like Apollo, who are already kicking the tires at other companies. Everything that happened to radio 10-20 years ago is now happening to TV.
We've seen the same thing with radio companies. There's no value in owning a declining asset. As a company, they've done nothing to enhance or grow that asset. They haven't merchandised it well in ways to enhance value. So they might as well sell. We're seeing other TV groups in a similar situation, including CBS (through Paramount Global) or ABC through Disney. There are fewer buyers and more sellers. Thats always a bad sign. What it mainly leaves are the investment companies like Apollo, who are already kicking the tires at other companies. Everything that happened to radio 10-20 years ago is now happening to TV.
Well Sinclair shouldn't buy Bally Sports in the first place, Fox should've kept the RSNs in the first place if they wanna focus on Fox News and Fox Sports which Disney didn't acquire. Also Apollo has a radio business and they sold their Houston cluster to Urban One, so we'll see how it will plays out but the good news is the stations Sinclair is selling will not be doing baseless propaganda anymore if they go their local rival groups or the parents of the broadcasters. I'm sure KTUL or KTVL will be revived under new owners.
I can see them offloading WVTV Milwaukee since they don’t offer any local news except for public affairs.
Sometimes in business, you bet on something growing over your ownership. RSN's were all the rage for a while, and the concept sort of made sense: Control broadcast rights for all the local professional sports teams in a market, and make your cable channel the only place to watch them. The problem was; that pro sports teams saw an opportunity to recover some escalated player salaries by jacking it to the RSN in multi-year rights fees. Multiply that strategy by however many teams the RSN broadcasts, add in a pandemic with a downturn in advertising, and then a pinch of those same teams you're paying so much for taking away in-game ads other than pre and postgame, and any positive quickly became a huge money-sucking black hole.
Apollo is nothing more than another private equity firm. Buy distressed properties, cut expenses to the bone, operate for a couple of years, and then start looking for a big fish.
Aren't they doing 'The National Desk' in Milwaukee? That's their go-to for news in smaller markets where their national sales group can place ads.
Are we thinking of statewide networks in some cases or in other cases merging with a larger TV market.
The smallest markets would have to merge together to form a statewide network like how all the major TV stations in Hawaii form a statewide network from their main offices in Honolulu.
Murdock wanted to cash out so he sold to Disney and Sinclair. He got out at the right time as it seems.
Hawaii is a unique situation because it's one market spread over several islands. Anyone who bought stations from Sinclair would just be forming or growing a group, not necessarily a network.
They are but that’s all they’re good for.
If the market is saturated with local news which in itself is being replaced by social media, but there aren't enough local-direct advertisers to support that many newscasts being profitable, then yes.
No, I'm thinking something like TBN. I don't know what larger religious groups own TV stations.
In St. Louis we're still waiting for the local newscasts that Sinclair dropped in 2001 and has promises to reinstate every few years. The National Desk gets fewer viewers than the syndicated reruns got. ABC 30's entire profit -such as it is - seems to come from rneting its studio out for local commercial production.
Ultimately rated number of viewers in a particular market doesn't matter. When you have a national newscast, Sinclair isn't selling local spots, but their national sales department is selling based on reach.
Reading the article, surprised not to see Seattle (KOMO/ABC) potentially being sold along with KATU (ABC) Portland, OR which I could see especially considering how lukewarm they were about Sinclair taking over KOMO from Fisher.
My guess is that Seattle is a much larger market and they have two stations: KOMO and KUNS. Just as with radio, Portland has too many local TV stations for total pop count, and their second station in Portland is a Class CA, not full market like KUNS in Seattle. Much harder to make money doing news in that sort of environment. The situation in Portland would probably be similar in a market like Spokane.
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