Goodbye to Shorewest TV; Hello TouchVision (WDJT-DT4)

[mrschimpf]

I didn't even know about this until last night when I tuned past on my cable subchannel section, but the long looping bandwidth waste that was Shorewest TV on 58.4 ended at 5am Monday morning. I weep for the loss of that Beyonce sound-alike music they used on every fourth home presentation, terrible sound and picture, and the same nine PSA's over and over again. It looks like it was mutual as the network still exists at Shorewest.TV, but can be fine tuned to home type, location and price, unlike 58.4.

Of course, the channel couldn't go away to add bandwidth to 58.1 or be moved to 49, 41 or 63. Now we have a 16:9 information channel called TouchVision that I can best describe as...experimental.

Think that channel you see on the TV's at Arby's or WalMart that keeps looping stories and infotainment segments, but designed for younger people than the usual robo-loops like AccuWeather. A bunch of irreverently named segments, chopped up presentations of wire service video and lots and lots of rock music. The only sign it's 58 is a three minute loop of the station's weather computer graphics and skycams at the half-hour mark.

Apparently it's in beta and meant for multi-platforms like tablets and also is on the air in Chicago, also on a Weigel station. I think it's interesting and makes for good background noise, but many others I'm sure won't like it at all and will just keep it on the delete list.

[SRW1000]

Great.  One useless station replaced with another useless station.

Both at the cost of HD bandwidth.

Sigh.

[Jack 1000]

I didn't even know about this until last night when I tuned past on my cable subchannel section, but the long looping bandwidth waste that was Shorewest TV on 58.4 ended at 5am Monday morning. I weep for the loss of that Beyonce sound-alike music they used on every fourth home presentation, terrible sound and picture, and the same nine PSA's over and over again. It looks like it was mutual as the network still exists at Shorewest.TV, but can be fine tuned to home type, location and price, unlike 58.4.

Of course, the channel couldn't go away to add bandwidth to 58.1 or be moved to 49, 41 or 63. Now we have a 16:9 information channel called TouchVision that I can best describe as...experimental.

Think that channel you see on the TV's at Arby's or WalMart that keeps looping stories and infotainment segments, but designed for younger people than the usual robo-loops like AccuWeather. A bunch of irreverently named segments, chopped up presentations of wire service video and lots and lots of rock music. The only sign it's 58 is a three minute loop of the station's weather computer graphics and skycams at the half-hour mark.

Apparently it's in beta and meant for multi-platforms like tablets and also is on the air in Chicago, also on a Weigel station. I think it's interesting and makes for good background noise, but many others I'm sure won't like it at all and will just keep it on the delete list.

The graphics are over-scanned on my TWC station.  Letters cut off.  It is in Beta.  What exactly is the format of this channel?

Jack

[LoadStar]

To me, this station reminds me a bit of a more serious version of the pre-roll that they have at movie theaters these days.

[WITI6fan]

If this is the "future" of television news like they think it is, we're all doomed.

Two of the executives were fired from Tribune Broadcasting for royally screwing up the place. Lee Abrams is a former radio executive who was brought in under former Tribune CEO and OWI recipient Randy Michaels. He thought it was A good idea to can a news department in Houston and replaced it with something like "TouchVision" called "NewsFix" that they thought they could replace traditional news on ALL their stations with. A national version eventually made it to the few Tribune stations with no news, but the idea doesn't seem to be taking off... He later resigned after sending an "inappropriate email"

Bill Carey was the News Director at Tribune's New York City station WPIX. A few years ago he bought into this "younger viewer" thing and decided to radically reformat their news broadcasts. There was no easing into the changes, one day they just went from a tradional format to the "hip" format that was done from a corner of the newsroom. Social Media and pointless commentary ruled the shows. Ratings plummeted and remain some of the worst in the market. He got canned and the new NF struggles to clean up the mess he made.

But this... This will go places!

There's a mall across the street from Tribune Tower in Chicago that has a loop like this running on monitors in the food court. I almost wonder if that's where they got the idea.

[PONIES]

The first thing I think of when I think of "younger viewers"... is a crappy standard definition subchannel on over-the-air television.