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TV: 'Dothan's NBC' WDON-LP sold to Gray Television?

N

Nate Wesley

A tipster on the Montgomery TV & Radio website found an interesting filing: New Moon Communications, owners of several low-power stations with 'pending' affiliations with NBC, is selling Dothan, AL station WDON-LP to Atlanta-based Gray Television, owners of WTVY (CBS/CW/MyNetTV).

Slightly more apropos to know--Gray also owns two Panama City, FL stations in WJHG (NBC/CW) and the still-new WECP-LD built out to house a new CBS affiliation separate from WTVY. See the plan? Flip the affiliations around for the Alabama side.

Dothan will likely get its own NBC affiliate after all, just not from this New Moon outfit.
 
You are correct. This is going to knock WSFA and WJHG off the cable systems in SE Alabama. Gray is already looking for on-air talent for the NBC newscast which will be produced by WTVY. I never understood why Gray launched the CBS LP station in PC since WTVY has such a monster signal across the panhandle. It all makes sense now.
 
Oh gawd! Dothan is not big enough for three news teams! Gray should just put a rerun of Andy Griffith or MASH on durring the 6 & 10 o'clock news spots and use the WTVY team for Today Show local segments.
Also Raycom should simulcast WSFA news programs on their WDFX Ozark-Dothan Fox affiliate. Should keep everyone happy... Montgmery news is significantly viewed in the Dothan DMA.

Did the new Gray LP CBS take over WTVY's spot on Dish and DirecTV in the Florida panhandle? Wouldn't make a whole lot of sense seeing that WTVY's transmitter is technically located in the Panama City DMA.
 
For Gray, adding the LPTV stations in Dothan and Panama City make sense. These stations give them an additional outlet to sell advertising on locally. Also, ad agencies only buy based on market. Thus Gray wasn't able to sell adds on WTVY based on the viewership of both markets. Finally, satellite services (especially Dish because of court cases against them) are limited in offering out of market stations, even in markets that are missing a network.

These factors are why you are seeing a push in many small markets to fill in the network gaps with LPTV stations or subchannels by existing stations. With today's automation, offering an additional channel of programming is much easier that it was in earlier days. New Moon's problem is they didn't have any of these advantages, since they would be a new operator in these very small markets.

As for OTA viewers, there's really no loss. If you received WTVY, you still receive it, and maybe even get WECP-LP as a bonus. If you didn't receive WTVY, you might get WECP, and if not, you're no worse off.
 
Neil, are you suggesting that Panama City didn't have CBS available on Dish or DirecTV before the LPTV signed on?
WTVY has been the CBS affiliate for that market for decades. I thought they held the CBS affiliation rights for PCB... I guess I just always assumed WTVY was on everyone's lineup.

I know the satellite companies have never offered all the significantly viewed stations anywhere in the Wiregrass area. The only Georgia station available on Sat in Bainbridge was GPTV even though WALB was the most watched NBC affiliate in the county.
 
Satellite TV has to play by much more restrictive rules than cable, because cable people basically wrote the rules. (That's my opinion, anyway.)

When I lived in small town Grenada, Mississippi, I brought my DirecTV service over from my previous residence in the Birmingham DMA. Grenada is part of the Greenwood-Greenville-Lake Village, AR market, which at the time only had CBS, ABC and PBS afilliates. Cablecos in that area provided NBC from Tupelo, Jackson and/or Memphis. Fox was a special national generic satellite feed. No one carried MyNTV or CW. Because Grenada was on the edge of the market, we instead got Fox and CW from Columbus, MS.

Because DirecTV didn't uplink that market, I was ineligible for ANY locals. But I was also not eligible for distants because even though I couldn't get Tupelo-Columbus-West Point stations on satellite (which WERE carried on DirecTV) the stations from both markets denied my waiver requests. So I was technically limited to what I could receive OTA, which was PBS/MPB from Oxford and NBC from Tupelo. Even with an attic amplified antenna I couldn't get ANYTHING else.

That's how screwed up and unfair the rules for satellite local carriage are. So chances are that in PC, WTVY was never on satellite, or at least on DirecTV. Dish seemed to have more success with distants than DirecTV did for some reason.

(Epilogue: The DirecTV installers in Mississippi never bothered to change my "service address" when they did the install, so I wound up keeping my Birmingham locals the whole time since I was still in that spot beam. It was my saving grace and also allowed me to keep up with the news back home.)
 
Yep, I know all about Dish limitations. I've just skirted around the actual PCB DMA. I have full knowledge of Tally, Albany, Dothan, the Gump, and of course Mobile. But since I can receive all the full power PCB stations OTA in SW Georgia I assumed I knew all about the PCB DMA.

As for moving and getting major market stations by not giving Dish your real service address I know how to do that too. My Verizon cell service address is listed in Navada which saves me around 40$/month in Florida taxes.

If it weren't for Dish's lack of carriage of all OTA stations carried on Cable I wouldn't have bothered putting up two antenna towers in SW Georgia, I'd have just gotten a dish (I'm 10 miles from the nearest CATV line).
 
Dish is very limited on distant locals because they were caught granting them to too many unqualified subscribers back around 2005. A court decision imposed some additional penalties and reporting on them that DirectTv doesn't have. Also from the standpoint of the satellite providers, it's probably more trouble than it's worth to authorize stations at the city or county level, rather than by market.

One thing I've noticed about Dish is that some statewide OBS networks are available as "statewide locals" even in parts of the state that do not have a transmitter in market (such as the Georgia portion of the Tallahasse and Greenville, SC markets), but not other state systems (Alabama and Iowa). Not sure what they are using to allow the out of market distribution, although it is a good thing.
 
poledo said:
Oh gawd! Dothan is not big enough for three news teams! Gray should just put a rerun of Andy Griffith or MASH on durring the 6 & 10 o'clock news spots and use the WTVY team for Today Show local segments.
Also Raycom should simulcast WSFA news programs on their WDFX Ozark-Dothan Fox affiliate. Should keep everyone happy... Montgmery news is significantly viewed in the Dothan DMA.

Did the new Gray LP CBS take over WTVY's spot on Dish and DirecTV in the Florida panhandle? Wouldn't make a whole lot of sense seeing that WTVY's transmitter is technically located in the Panama City DMA.
Click to expand...
Totally agree! I don't know if you could classify WDHN as having a news team! LOL! However, the big winner in this deal could be the Raycom owned Fox affiliate in Dothan. They already show some WSFA produced newscasts and plan to add even more. Since WSFA won't be available on cable, WDFX will be the source for those that are used to watching WSFA News.
 
WDHN's news programming is exactly the alternative to WTVY and WSFA that is needed in the Wiregrass. Do they still read stories out of the Dothan Eagle on the morning news? Doing it right low budget style for as long as I can remember.

I looked up WDON-LP and it appears they are going to broadcast a directional signal toward Dothan from the WTVY tower in Florida. That NBC LP needs to broadcast from somewhere in the Ross Clark circle to be any use to OTA viewers in the most densely populated area of the DMA. They probably need a second LP to simulcast NBC to Enterprise unless the sole purpose of the new LP is cable and dish carriage. I seriously doubt rabbit ears can pick up any NBC stations in Houston county and the new WDON LP location in Florida probably won't help.
 
poledo said:
WDHN's news programming is exactly the alternative to WTVY and WSFA that is needed in the Wiregrass. Do they still read stories out of the Dothan Eagle on the morning news? Doing it right low budget style for as long as I can remember.

I looked up WDON-LP and it appears they are going to broadcast a directional signal toward Dothan from the WTVY tower in Florida. That NBC LP needs to broadcast from somewhere in the Ross Clark circle to be any use to OTA viewers in the most densely populated area of the DMA. They probably need a second LP to simulcast NBC to Enterprise unless the sole purpose of the new LP is cable and dish carriage. I seriously doubt rabbit ears can pick up any NBC stations in Houston county and the new WDON LP location in Florida probably won't help.
Click to expand...
They (WDHN) don't have a morning newscast, or a weekend for that matter. The original site of the LP tower is near the Ross Clark Circle on the east side of Dothan. Look for Gray to simulcast the new LP NBC on one of WTVY's sub-channels for better coverage. That is what they did in Panama City, simulcasting WECP on WJHG 7.3.
 
I must be having very old memories. I'm thinking about the days when WDHN's anchor Charlie Platt would be sitting in a chair with a copy of the Dothan Eagle reading news stories in the morning. I just went to WDHN's website and don't see any mention of Charlie. For all I know he may have retired a decade ago.
 
The main signal is just for cable and dish carriage. The same thing is happening in the Greenwood-Greenville, MS market where Commonwealth, who owns the full power ABC affiliate and runs the full power CBS affiliate through a shell company, they've put on two LDTV stations for Fox and NBC. Both have tiny coverage footprints but are on all the cable providers. Or will be when the Fox station gets built out.

If NBC is also being carried on a subchannel of WTVY that's just a bone for the few OTA viewers left.
 
Now that Grey has things wrapped up in PCB and Dothan you've got to wonder how much longer it'll take them to get WSWG moved all the way into the Albany DMA with full coverage... Home of Grey's former flagship WALB.
 
poledo said:
I must be having very old memories. I'm thinking about the days when WDHN's anchor Charlie Platt would be sitting in a chair with a copy of the Dothan Eagle reading news stories in the morning. I just went to WDHN's website and don't see any mention of Charlie. For all I know he may have retired a decade ago.
Click to expand...
Charlie wasn't a new anchor. He hosted the hokey morning show and talked fishing, hunting etc. and he did read headlines from the Eagle. Charlie almost died a couple of years ago and had a quintuple bypass. Good guy.
 
Charlie's morning show was what I watched every morning on WDHN. Great show. Good guy. One of his regular segments was a phone interview with my old friend Jack Wingate were they would discuss the fishing and hunting conditions down at Lake Seminole. The interview regularly drifted toward topics like "what did the Mrs. cook for dinner last night?" Now if Charlie wasn't the perfect representative for the Wiregrass, I don't know who else could have been.
I doubt Charlie could have been replaced. Is it safe to assume WDHN cancelled his show instead of trying to find a replacement?
 
Charlie's still there 5:30-7:00am Monday thru Friday. Jack Wingate passed last year. Best local show since Red Holland! ;D
 
It's good to know Charlie's still where he needs to be.
I know all about Jack. Our families knew each other very well, we were neighbors for decades. The predominant story teller of the area... half of his stories were ours! Heck, half of his "museum artifacts" were ours. It's a shame what those folks from up north have turned his "Lunker Lodge" into. Can't even get fried Catfish anymore.
 
poledo said:
WDHN's news programming is exactly the alternative to WTVY and WSFA that is needed in the Wiregrass. Do they still read stories out of the Dothan Eagle on the morning news? Doing it right low budget style for as long as I can remember.

I looked up WDON-LP and it appears they are going to broadcast a directional signal toward Dothan from the WTVY tower in Florida. That NBC LP needs to broadcast from somewhere in the Ross Clark circle to be any use to OTA viewers in the most densely populated area of the DMA. They probably need a second LP to simulcast NBC to Enterprise unless the sole purpose of the new LP is cable and dish carriage. I seriously doubt rabbit ears can pick up any NBC stations in Houston county and the new WDON LP location in Florida probably won't help.
Click to expand...

Poledo,
where did you find that info on WDON-LP? Only contour I saw was on FCC database showing coverage from tower on eastside of town.
 
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