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US Open Men's Final not broadcast locally?

Y

ynot2k

WTSP, the CBS affiliate in Tampa-St. Pete, decided not to run the US Open Men's Final Monday afternoon, opting instead for Dr. Phil and the news...thereby picking hundreds of phone calls from p-o'd tennis fans instead of hundreds of phone calls from p-o'd Dr. Phil fans!

http://blogs.tampabay.com/media/2008/09/angry-area-tenn.html

Supposedly as many as 10 percent of CBS affiliates went the same way... any similar stories from elsewhere in the country?
 
Listening to a national sports radio show, one of the callers mentioned that in Greensboro, North Carolina, WFMY (which like WTSP, is owned by Gannett) didn't carry the men's final either, opting for regular programming (reruns of the Andy Griffith Show and news).
 
Here in Madison, WISC-TV3's analog signal aired Oprah and news as previously scheduled (with an extended Live at Five when the CBS Evening News would've aired). The US Open broadcast aired on their digital subchannel, MyMadison 14 (Channel 3.2, in standard definition). However, HD viewers watching WISC's main digital channel, 3.1 (either on cable or over-the-air), saw the US Open rather than the local programming that analog viewers saw. Unlike MyMadison 14, the Channel 3.1 broadcast aired a clean hi-def feed from CBS, without any local commercial breaks.
 
Indianapolis's WISH-TV dumped the US Open coverage off to duopoly parter WNDY
 
Marc? Did their "CBS 3" service for Springfield, MA (WFSB-DT 3-2) air the tennis? I was at work and never put the TVs on anything with an antenna since the weather wasn't an issue here (greater Hartford) on Monday.
 
In Charleston, SC, WCSC aired the final, blowing out all the local newscasts, but Charleston is a big tennis market, with the Family Circle Cup every year.

They aired their 6pm news online, which was the first time that they had ever done that, but it worked.
 
Darrel M said:
Here in Madison, WISC-TV3's analog signal aired Oprah and news as previously scheduled (with an extended Live at Five when the CBS Evening News would've aired)...HD viewers watching WISC's main digital channel, 3.1 (either on cable or over-the-air), saw the US Open rather than the local programming that analog viewers saw...[T]he Channel 3.1 broadcast aired a clean hi-def feed from CBS, without any local commercial breaks.
Click to expand...

Fort Myers CBS affiliate WINK TV did the same.
 
ShawnHill1 said:
Listening to a national sports radio show, one of the callers mentioned that in Greensboro, North Carolina, WFMY (which like WTSP, is owned by Gannett) didn't carry the men's final either, opting for regular programming (reruns of the Andy Griffith Show and news).
Click to expand...

WFMY did put the tennis match on its digital channel. It was an
unpopular decision (after all, the Andy Griffith episode was the
umpteenth rerun of Andy and Barney's high school reunion), but
g.m. Deborah Hooper felt the regular schedule of news at 5 and
Andy at 5:30 would do better than tennis. She may be right;
the tennis averaged a 1.9 overnight rating nationally.

WDBJ Roanoke, VA, also opted for Andy over the tennis match,
so the only one of three CBS affiliates I can pick up, WRAL Raleigh,
carried tennis on its analog channel.
 
The main issue in all of this was the fact that if they aired the match, they would have had to preempt local 6 PM newscasts to do so. That would have led viewers to go to the competition...and in some instances never to come back. Syndicated programming does not sound like an issue (I believe affiliates can reschedule it unlike network programming)...just the news.

It is unusual for a network to preempt during 6 PM newstime on a weekday outside of a holiday (Noontime and 5 PM newscasts often get the boot for weekday events, but never the 6 PM news).

Speaking of which...what did these stations do to fill in the 6:30 PM half-hour that Katie Couric would have been on?

In the case of WRAL...they have a 24/7 HD newschannel they could direct viewers too for 6 PM news (I don't know what they did). Most other stations do not. This may make a better argument for affiliates to add a second subchannel to guarantee network clearances.
 
jal41 said:
The main issue in all of this was the fact that if they aired the match, they would have had to preempt local 6 PM newscasts to do so. That would have led viewers to go to the competition...and in some instances never to come back. Syndicated programming does not sound like an issue (I believe affiliates can reschedule it unlike network programming)...just the news.
Click to expand...

I'm going to slightly disagree with you... I started this thread by citing an article from the St. Pete Times http://blogs.tampabay.com/media/2008/09/angry-area-tenn.html#comments, and the CBS affiliate down here pretty much admitted that their decision was Dr. Phil-related, not news-based.

"It was a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation," said WTSP spokesman Pete Nikiel, noting that fans can watch the tennis match right now on USOpen.org or on their digital weather channel.

Nikiel said CBS would not allow the station to re-air the match, insisting it be presented live.

"The tennis people are angry (but) if we hadn't done this, the Dr. Phil people would have been angry," added Nikiel, who couldn't say how many angry phone calls they had gotten. "Turns out, tennis fans are quite vocal."
Click to expand...
 
ynot2k said:
I'm going to slightly disagree with you... I started this thread by citing an article from the St. Pete Times http://blogs.tampabay.com/media/2008/09/angry-area-tenn.html#comments, and the CBS affiliate down here pretty much admitted that their decision was Dr. Phil-related, not news-based.
Click to expand...

WTSP's sister station here in Atlanta, WXIA, has had no problem with preempting Dr. Baldhead for NBC when needed, they have just simply aired the show at 3 PM the next day. (At least WXIA now has a sister, WATL, to pawn programming onto). It is a bad situation either way.

In the case of when WGCL preempts (Ellen in this case), they air the show at 2:35 AM (WGCL has a 4 PM newscast). Preemption-king WSB-TV (which is preempting for one hour of primetime for two nights this week) and no-preemption WAGA have done 7 PM newscasts when the network needs the time.

95% of the preemptions were done on the basis of the 6 PM news. WTSP management might say otherwise (a "soundbite" for the newspaper). But Dr. Baldhead might be a popular draw in Tampa (enough to cause concern for WTSP - no one knew that Katie Couric was #1 in nearby Ft. Myers until recently).
 
Apparently, KHOU [11] sent The US Open Men's final match over to KTBU [55] in Houston. Channel 11 was committed to show "The Doctors" & "Oprah" , and its was also carried on Channel 11.2 [A High-Def Channel] and also on Comcast as well.
 
KYW-TV in Philadelphia did air the Men's final that caused the season premiere of Dr. Phil from 5-6 PM, news from 6-7 PM, ET/Insider from 7-8 PM not to air.
 
WLKY in Louisville aired the tennis game on the HD channel with local news on the NTSC channel. Get ready to see more of this, and with the federal gub'ment giving away HD converter boxes, there's no reason to be bitching about it. Either upgrade to HD or get left behind.
 
Well, KYW aired it because it is an owned and operated station by CBS, and all CBS O and O's are required to air almost everything the network carries.

The stations in Charleston are preemption-friendly, as they do move shows to open timeslots later in the week.

My channel 2 only preempts for the Carolina Children's Charity telethon (eight hours on a Sunday in March), a very important local event that has been in existence for over 20 years.

WCSC preempts primetime shows (mostly repeats) for Billy Graham, but they have done it for most of their history. They also preempted the Labor Day airing of the U.S. Open for the Jerry Lewis telethon, moving it to one of their local cable channels. They used to do much more, preempting primetime for College of Charleston basketball games (back when they were getting popular), the Midnight Basketball League, and stuff like mayoral debates.

WCIV is the worst at it now, with a preemption at least twice a month, for local specials hosted by the main news anchors, hurricane specials (like most in this part of the nation), St. Jude's Hospital, and even infomercials for a local spine institute, basically 30 minutes of PR.
 
I think it was all just a case of bad timing with the beginning of the syndication season. You go past the Eastern Time Zone and into Central and Mountain and move into 4pm in those time zones, you run into CBS stations carrying Oprah's premiere with not only the Olympic medalists, but in HD, along with "Dr. Phil", "ET" and "The Insider" in that format, and the premieres of "The Doctors", "Bonnie Hunt" and "Deal or No Deal". You pre-empt that first episode of the season/ever, you lose all your momentum to get the viewer stuck at 5pm on your news, and then you get the whining from the viewers via the phone that Oprah was pre-empted, along with the stink eye from the syndicator because you forever cursed "The Doctors" to low ratings.

It was short-sighted if a station had to push tennis off, definitely, but it's one of those situations were either way, you're angering someone. I think CBS should've just pre-empted their primetime and aired the match then like with the women's final (although CBS airs the men's final on Sunday afternoon specifically because they claim the women's final always outdraws the men's), or push it to USA as a last hurrah for that network (although then you would have got WWE pre-emption grief involved if they went into lengthy tiebreakers past 9pm).
 
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