Milwaukee HDTV User Group

This is the exact reverse of 2013; with about seven months to go on the terrible agreement Steve Wexler 'negotiated' with Time Warner in that summer which pretty much put Journal on the road to ruin and Scripps merger (and WTMJ on channel 2, 83 in Plymouth), Scripps and Time Warner had a much quieter renegotiation and came to terms on a new long-term agreement.

So no drama this August from channel 4 being pulled...that's a small relief.

It looks like they've added content to them (I'm currently trying to maintain the affil list in Wikipedia but since 5.1 is all but impossible to grab in Sheboygan I'm stuck in trust/verify mode)...do we know what they've added. I know 68.2 is EVINE but after that I'm unsure.

The good news first is that WTMJ has finally added a SAP channel for audio description for regular programming/Spanish play-by-play for sports. This is a few weeks before the FCC's audio description requirements hit the Milwaukee market on July 1st, and WTMJ was the last to add a SAP channel; WDJT and WITI always have had one going back to the analog age, and WISN put theirs online in early 2014. This leaves WMVS/WMVT as the only major stations without DVS (I never knew why), as WVTV and WCGV really aren't affected by any of the FCC requirements.

Of course that great news comes with Scripps adding more lousy subchannel networks to WTMJ; Escape, a 'women's network' which thinks women="big fans of Snapped and Forensic Files reruns and awful crime films even This TV won't touch", and LAFF, a great network for sitcoms, if you enjoyed ABC sitcoms in the 1990's. Right now it looks like one of them will replace Cozi on DT3 (likely Laff), with a DT4 channel added on to make the .1 signal look even worse. :bang: Hopefully with new management comes actually putting these channels on cable (especially Charter), but I'm not holding my breath.

Quote from: LoadStar;60100Wow, that's useful! /s

If I were more bored, I'd pull their public file and find out what exactly they're doing for their required E/I programming.

Airing a bunch of ancient and boring religious content for kids at 9am every morning when kids don't watch; it makes the Sunshine Factory tapes aired 40,000 times on WVCY look heathenistic in comparison. The last file still has the OK shows they aired under Pappas management, whereas 'Cabellero Acquisition' is just phoning it in with Jimmy Swaggart's network on auto-feed and this.

And now it's switched to Jimmy Swaggart's Sonlife Network full-time. Because that's what the market needed; another religious network rather than you know, Univision over the air or literally any other network.

Enjoy getting this channel added next week in full HD, Time Warner customers! :bang:

It's not of any use any longer; as of yesterday the entire channel is now devoted fully to infomercials throughout the entire broadcast day thanks to the new ownership who seems to only be in it to sell off the spectrum.

The more annoying this is we've been waiting for years for Charter to add WMVT in HD, and now we have this wasting bandwidth. It's quite annoying.

Well that's one way to get the declining newspapers off your books; spin them all off into an existing publishing company, and keep the TV/radio stations to yourselves (the Spelling Bee stays with New Scripps though).

This is definitely a big deal; it's the end of the ancient rivalry between Journal and Hearst that went back to the turn of the century in Milwaukee, but now it sets off so many questions. Scripps is a good broadcasting company and definitely shares Journal's hate of syndicated programming and over-scheduling of local news, so it's definitely a merger of equals rather than anything Sinclair or Nexstar.

But Scripps is also heavy with ABC affiliates, with iron-clad deals in many of their markets that date back to the 1994 affiliate switches. There is an (admittedly questionable) possbility that Scripps could switch TMJ to ABC, setting up the self-admitted 'best ABC affiliate', WISN to go to the Peacock.

Finally though I would hate to be at 4th & State tomorrow; the J-S has always had unqualified journalistic independence (though very monopolistic) and operates as if they've never had to answer to their stockholders. Under new Scripps ownership combined with Journal, that may not happen any longer.

Let the chaos begin.

Quote from: LoadStar;60023The subchannel is indeed "Movies!". I did a doubletake when I saw them roll an ad for it during the WISN News a couple of days ago.

Maybe Weigel will finally dust off the "MeToo" subchannel they've promised for the Milwaukee market since 2009 on 49.3 (More likely they're getting Escape or Grit themselves and needed the space). Surprised they would move to WISN but I'm assuming the hand-off on cable will be seamless and under the existing Hearst agreements since outside of Milwaukee, Hearst does alot of subchannel business with Weigel.

Actually the schedule is a clone of what's on Movies!, so I'm thinking it's a data error and it's unlikely that Weigel would have Hearst take it. However there is a new network called 'Grit' starting around the time WISN-DT2's listings starts; it'll have mainly male-targeted films, while a sister network called 'Escape' will have romance and suspense films targeted at women. That might be what's intended but we shall see.

Quote from: jrh1985;60016Was WIWN bought buy someone? ONTV4U has been on every day from 9 to 5 and from 10PM till who knows when! However, WN is back on by 4 AM.

Yup, as I said in another WIWN thread, some small group which mainly ran do-nothing MTV Tres stations is running it under a local marketing agreement until the sale from Pappas goes through, so they're putting on infomercials in random non-sensical slots in the same way Live Well on 4.3 does.

It's still on, just fine on Charter. However there are some timeslots where ONTV4U...aka 24/7 infomercials are placed; it seems like they use it as a backup feed to provide some programming if the WeatherNation feed drops out and a few hours when they get some revenue. I panicked when I checked in with it this evening and it was on (and hideous in stretch-o-vision'ed 4:3), but it went back to WN after an hour.

Quote from: John L;59995That was quick!!!   I see they have lifestyle programs on this morning, but 3 movies scheduled for this afternoon.
-John L.

Their E/I chasm of doom is stuck on Friday mornings to get it out of the way (the said lifestyle programming); the rest of the schedule is all movies. Judging from the usual pattern though, it'll be Charter that will pick it up first within weeks, with TWC taking their sweet time to get it on their systems. Why is it TWC is so slow to get new subchannels up?

Quote from: MDR;59992GETTV 18.2 live now. Picture quality pretty good

Is it widescreen or a 4:3 letterbox?

We knew it couldn't last forever, but today Sinclair announced that a digital subchannel movie network run by Sony, getTV will air on 18.2 by the end of the year.

I'm sure these days signal management means we won't even notice any loss in detail for 18.1 (and I can't blame the local guys really since they have to take whatever Hunt Valley throws at them), but if all the people behind digital subchannels think we want are reruns, movies and weather, it's incredibly uncreative.

Pappas, which has been in wind-down mode for years under a bankruptcy trust, is selling WIWN to a company known as "Caballero Acquisition" for $1.8 million.

They mainly own a bunch of low-power do-nothing MTV Tres stations in California and Texas Viacom unloaded in one of their convoluted 'buy out a competing network and gut them for ours' schemes, but hopefully outside of adding a couple of subchannels, probably won't remove WeatherNation since Tres is already on cable market-wide and running a budding full-power operation is a lot different than little LP's simulcasting re-dubbed MTV programs.