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Licensee of WSRE ends PBS affiliation for the Pensacola TV market.

Let me elaborate. WSRE got a new on-air ID with their logo changed to a simplified text saying "WSRE; Pensacola, Florida", removing the PBS logo and showing the tower clock at Pensacola State College.
 
IM42A said:
WEIQ seems to deliver a usable OTA signal to Pensacola proper, but it peters out a few miles east of Pensacola, this per the heat map on rabbitears.info . Most of Eglin Air Force Base completely loses it.
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The maps are generous. In Pensacola you need a rooftop antenna to pick up WEIQ.
 
Final show WSRE ever aired as a PBS station before switching to Educational independent was Finding Your Roots: Secret Lives with Carol Burnett and Niecy Nash. The episode was at thr near end when it was cut to the new WSRE on-air ID before cutting to The Florida Channel. World, PBS Kids, and Create had their programming cut to the same on-air ID before they all went dark.

End of era for Pensacola ans Fort Walton Beach... they will have to find other ways to watch PBS programing.
 
They might be able to, but it the programming would need to be non-commercial if it is on a 23.x subchannel. Another option would be to enter into a spectrum sharing agreement with another LPTV or full power station that wished to give up its spectrum. The difference is that the other station would operating on its own license (and channel number), so it wouldn't be bound by WSRE's non-commercial license.
 
tomservo said:
It'll be interesting to see what approach they take to get PBS back into the area. My guess is they'll just spin up something for cable/satellite viewers and leave OTA out of it, but it'd also be nice if they could lease some space somewhere for antenna users.
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The good news is they'll be independent from state government control. The bad news is they'll not receive state government money.

So perhaps they can reach enough people the way you describe.
 
tomservo said:
It'll be interesting to see what approach they take to get PBS back into the area. My guess is they'll just spin up something for cable/satellite viewers and leave OTA out of it, but it'd also be nice if they could lease some space somewhere for antenna users.
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Sounds kind of like PBS Appalachia Virginia in Bristol.

Dumb question, could they lease a subchannel on WSRE? Or get a commercial station to lease or even donate one (tax advantage?), if that's even allowed? (Getting back to the PBSAV comparison, I've wondered if they could get a subchannel on WCYB, or even WETP for that matter.)

Another dumb question, is there a vacant channel allocation (either full-power or LPTV) in the Pensacola area that they could use?
 
I don't know about vacant channel allocations around here, but we have two stations that have noncomm and commercial subchannels already, WPAN and WFBD. Both carry TCT along with commercial supported networks, so I suppose PBS could lease space on one or both.

There's an LPTV from De Funiak Springs that has a CP to relocate to Pensacola (W27EP-D/W32GD-D) that might be worth looking at but I don't know if it's even ever actually been on the air. WDES-CD (Beach TV) and WGOX-LD (Life Television) are either in Baldwin County or have a permit to move there, so that's two more stations with bandwidth to spare.

Edit to add: There's also WCTU-LD but it's (supposedly) ATSC 3.0 so that might not be much of a solution.
 


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