[opendtv] What happens with the UPN stations
- From: John Willkie <johnwillkie@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2006 13:59:49 -0700 (GMT-07:00)
I guess you don't follow the business of television closely, if at all.
In most major markets, the Tribune Company (chi tribune) was the WB affiliate.
They (either defacto or with a wink and a nod) became the CW affiliate.
Otherwise, there was effectively an auction by CW to see whether the local UPN,
WB (or another station) got the CW affiliation. In your market, CBS owned the
UPN affiliate station, but ISTR that there was a Tribune owned station.
The requested terms of which I heard were rather draconian: 25-30% of LOCAL
revenues, with the network retaining x minutes per hour, with some type of an
equity kicker. (I have to be somewhat vague due to having a limited NDA). In at
least one case that I heard of, the proposal from the local station was
rejected because they offered less than the required minimum of local revenues.
The "winner" got CW. Sometimes this was the WB affiliate, sometimes the UPN
affiliate, sometimes an indy.
So, this isn't about the UPN stations, it's about the odd "man" out.
As to the survey, let me repeat here (by reference) the first sentence above.
When Nielsen calls up, they are looking for specific criteria. If they are
seeking Spanish-speaking households, you wouldn't have understood the questions.
It seems from this distance that they had filled their quota for suburban
households in the November diary race that didn't have cable and didn't have
satellite. Bottom line: you lost out on $2.00. (If you had been a Spanish
speaking household, they've recently upped the remuneration.)
The second qualifying question was probably to see if there was another
criteria that you qualified under. Here's something that I know from
first-hand experience: the caller can't deviate ONE WORD from the script, and
the script changes depending on how you answer questions.
You didn't make the cut. Actually, you didn't mention that, so that's an
assumption on my part.
John Willkie
Bert wrote
With WB and UPN networks merging into the CW network, I was wondering what
would come of the unused UPN OTA channels. Looks like the ex-UPN stations are
going to an all-soaps kind of format:
http://www.mynetworktv.com/
Over here, the UPN station is (for a couple more days) Channel 20 (WDCA-TV).
They will become My20.
On another note, my wife got a TV survey call the other day. A couple of
interesting questions were:
1. How long after moving to this area did you subscribe to cable or DBS?
Choices were something like 1 month, 1 year, 5 years. How about "never"?
Not an option.
2. What advertizing do you find most effective? Choices were TV, print, direct
mail, Internet. Bless her, she said TV. I totally agree. Print, direct mail,
and Internet advertizing are thoroughly ignorable and routinely ignored, at
least by the two of us. I get these annoying phone calls from magazines asking
about how I reacted to this or that ad. It's almost embarrassing. I never even
saw them!
Bert
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