Their analog signal was very weak, and they were primarily established by cable. They thought they'd save money on the electric bills.
However, in the 04 mustcarry cycle, the FCC didn't have rules for digital only stations on satellite, so Dish and DirecTV got a freebie to drop the station. Google: FCC Dish WMCN. However, as its now a new must-carry cycle, and rules for digital only stations are enforced, they are awarded carriage.
I agree, WMCN and WTVE are truly big wastes, and there are others out there.
The way I see it, they run infomercials, let's the owners make a profit they can keep, maybe they employ 4-6 people, but they are disservicing all the paying customers of cable and satellite, the city of license, as it costs money to uplink and carry the stations, and there is opportunity cost for the satellite and cable companies to be giving channel bandwidth for something not benefiting the customers directly. Atleast channels like QVC and HSN, pay the cable/sat company for carriage, and it offsets some of the other channels like ESPN.
I wonder why one (WTVE or WMCN) couldn't align with HSN, much like how WHSP 65 (now WUVP 65) was once an HSN station, and there were other HSN stations out there before those stations were bought by Univision. As an HSN, cable could drop the HSN feed (save some space), satellite could drop the local feed (save some space), HSN would pay the station, and HSN would get back an OTA audience. Perhaps HSN is sticking with direct cable deals now only. There probably isn't too much programming that is profitable to run at the same time, but I'd rather these frequencies/stations not exist if so.
