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Worst Stations and Markets for Local TV

KOCR - Your VHS Rental Movie Station! (back around 1993 when it was doing horrible)

-crainbebo
 
Springfield/Holyoke, MA in the shadow of Hartford/New Haven, CT:

In the analog era, Springfield/Holyoke relied on Hartford's channel 3 and 61 for their CBS and FOX programming, respectively.

Maybe I could also mention Utica, NY? They've always had their own NBC, ABC and FOX stations (2, 20 and 33), but relied on Syracuse for CBS (5).
 
KTVO (ABC) has CBS on its 3.2 subchannel, but it's not carried on cable in Iowa. The Iowa systems have KCCI out of Des Moines in SD and HD. The market still has no NBC station.
 
How is not having Ion or Univision any sort of hardship? Don't those cities have cable systems?
 
I receive ION via satellite. I like the channel but I'm annoyed at the varying audio levels. They're all over the place. Anyone else noticed this?
 
vchimpanzee said:
In Charlotte, NC, Ion is not available on cable. PERIOD. The Pax affiliate was only part-time, and by the time Ion came along, they had dumped pretty much all Pax programming.
Click to expand...

On Comporium in Rock Hill SC (south of Charlotte), ION is on Channel 375 (Digital Basic Plus).
 
vchimpanzee said:
In Charlotte, NC, Ion is not available on cable. PERIOD. The Pax affiliate was only part-time, and by the time Ion came along, they had dumped pretty much all Pax programming.
Click to expand...

So, if people in Charlotte, NC, want to watch old reruns, I guess they're stuck with Netflix or Hulu. That doesn't sound like much of a curse, does it?
 
Cursed TV Stations

Over on another board, a user brought up the story of WJJY-TV in Jacksonville IL, a station that died too young. So, I’ll just go ahead and start a new thread on cursed TV stations.

Are there any stations in your market that are cursed (weak signal, no HD, program shifts, ownership changes, etc.)?
 
KRON in San Francisco has been cursed ever since they lost NBC to KNTV a dozen years ago. Way back when, they were the market leader in the Bay Area, but that honor now belongs to KGO while KRON continues to go downhill largely thanks to its inept ownership by Young Broadcasting.

In Alaska, it's KTVF (Fairbanks) and KYUR (Anchorage); both stations STILL have no local news in HD while KTUU and now KTVA are the only ones that do...as well as having their own satellite trucks. But I think KTVF is the most cursed of the two, as its current ownership and relocation to that tiny building where they share space with KFXF/KXD made it a whole lot worse. KYUR, on the other hand, has been DEAD LAST in the Anchorage ratings for almost 30 years with no end in sight.

But whatever; Fairbanks is the #202 market and I now live in #9 (Atlanta)! Ha-ha!!!
 
johnnya2k6 said:
KRON in San Francisco has been cursed ever since they lost NBC to KNTV a dozen years ago. Way back when, they were the market leader in the Bay Area, but that honor now belongs to KGO while KRON continues to go downhill largely thanks to its inept ownership by Young Broadcasting.
Click to expand...

It's worth noting that the free-fall of KRON has stopped. Due to the Young Broadcasting bankruptcy (due mostly to the KRON debacle), the station was sold to Media General. Though they'll never be the KRON of the 50s through the 90s, their news department is improving, and they have some decent syndicated programming.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Isn't there already a UHF morgue site which covers the history of many failed stations?

A great example in the Hartford/New Haven market was the old WHCT-TV channel 18. It was Hartford's first primary CBS affiliate. It was once owned by the late Dr. Gene Scott and his "church". Then they were a cut-rate independent station in the 1980s. It was almost exclusively Home Shopping Network when the FCC forced them off the air in 1991. They came back on around 1997 and almost became the market's then-PAX affiliate. Today they're WUVN-TV, a Univision affiliate.
 
KML-224 said:
They [WHCT] came back on around 1997 and almost became the market's then-PAX affiliate.
Click to expand...

Hartford's current PAX/ION station WHPX has a transmitter near New London, 20 or so miles away from its Providence station's (WPXQ) transmitter! This gives viewers in much of Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut two stations with almost the exact same programming! I don't know which station is cursed, or if they're both cursed.
 
WHPX-TV channel 26 of New London, CT has their transmitter in Montville, CT. WPXQ-TV channel 69 of Block Island/Providence, RI has their transmitter within a mile of the Connecticut border. Except for the top-of-hour legal ID, they're exactly the same. I get a weak signal of WPXQ-TV here in southern Hartford County once in a while.
 
I wish ION was PAX again. I miss watching Supermarket Sweep and Shop Till You Drop (Pat Finn, not really JD Roberto). If GSN can bring back old Pat Finn STYD reruns, why not Supermarket Sweep and David Ruprecht?

-crainbebo
 
Bowling Green, KY, lived in the shadow of Nashville for years. Although it had, and has, its own ABC affiliate, WBKO/13, it relied on Nashville for CBS (WTVF/5) and NBC (WSMV/4) until WNKY/40 signed on. WNKY/40.1 is Bowling Green's NBC affiliate; WNKY/40.2 is CBS, so there's no longer a need for Nashville stations (or Louisville's CBS affiliate, WLKY/32).
 
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