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Has WGN/9 Ever Promoted Superstation WGN/WGN America's Shows On It's Chicago Feed?

K

KKLM

Banned
From January 1, 1990 to December 2014, 2 different feeds of Chicago's WGN-TV were created. One feed (WGN/9) was made exclusivly just for Chicago viewers only, the other feed (Superstation WGN, Later WGN America) had a different program lineup than that of it's Chicago feed. But there's one particular question here: For those that have lived in the Chicago area between January 1, 1990 and December 2014, Did WGN/9 Ever Promote Any Of Superstation WGN/WGN America's Programs At All During It's Entire 15 Year Period? Please let me know in advance.
 
I might be mistaken, but during my visits to Chicago I swear I remember seeing occasional ads for shows such as Salem and Manhattan on the local feed. Wasn't often.
Back then, the only way for Chicago-area viewers to see WGN's superstation feed was on satellite. And while that WGN9 feed is meant for local viewers only, it's also seen across much of Canada. Jealous ...
 
I had never heard of a cable company carrying both the broadcast WGN-TV 9 and the Superstation. If you were within 50-100 miles of Chicago, you got the broadcast station. Outside, it was the Superstation. The two line-ups were originally the same. Even nationally you'd see the Chicago-area commercials. Then the two services began to see some different programming and the Chicago commercials were replaced with national spots.

If I'm not mistaken, both services ran the noon and 9pm newscasts, although the WGN-TV morning news block was not seen nationally. Weekend morning public affairs shows also were deleted from the national feed. I believe the two services also split over WB Network shows.

The noon news was still carried up till a few years ago. But now, I believe they are entirely separate.
 
Part of that issue was syndicated exclusivity. WGN could carry recent syndicated shows locally, but if they carried them nationally, Superstation WGN was subject to blackout. They came up with a blackout-proof schedule for the satellite version of WGN.
 
Gregg. said:
I had never heard of a cable company carrying both the broadcast WGN-TV 9 and the Superstation. If you were within 50-100 miles of Chicago, you got the broadcast station. Outside, it was the Superstation. The two line-ups were originally the same. Even nationally you'd see the Chicago-area commercials. Then the two services began to see some different programming and the Chicago commercials were replaced with national spots.

If I'm not mistaken, both services ran the noon and 9pm newscasts, although the WGN-TV morning news block was not seen nationally. Weekend morning public affairs shows also were deleted from the national feed. I believe the two services also split over WB Network shows.

The noon news was still carried up till a few years ago. But now, I believe they are entirely separate.
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Yep Gregg, that pretty much nails the situation from when WGN was considered a superstation. They are now classified as a cable network and have been since December 2014, and that's the point when the news and any remaining Chicago programming "to better serve the interests of our national audience." Because they are now a cable network, they can be and are carried in the Chicagoland area. Of the people I know there, not one of them watches the national version instead of WGN9.
Until 1/1/90, WGN's national feed was exactly the same as the local feed. Once syndex came along, it really took until about 1999 for the superstation to form its own identity. In the early days of exclusivity and even into the time when WGN showed the WB nationally, the local signal still took precedence, and by that I mean the superstation's schedule was built around the local schedule. They still showed all Cubs, Sox and Bulls games and all the news broadcasts, even to the point where when a superstation program covered a local show but ended early, WGN put what basically was a test pattern on the national feed until it caught up to the local. Throughout the 1990s, local commercials even still snuck through on occasion.
What really accelerated the change in feeds was WGN dropping the WB off the superstation in October 1999 (despite the WB losing roughly 10M viewers as a result of its own decision). By the next baseball season, even the local IDs were different between the feeds when the announcers would pause for station ID. Logos were different by this time as well, and throughout the 2000s the amount of Chicago news on the superstation decreased steadily (only the noon news was on every day, and the 9 p.m. news sometimes was blacked out).
 
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