City of license Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! ===The cable or digital TV placeholder=== Sometimes, putting a usable over-the-air signal into the primary community served is anywhere from second-priority to not a priority at all. A station could be [[rimshot (broadcasting)|barely within]] the [[Designated Market Area|market's boundaries]] or be underpowered to the point of putting a "B" grade signal into the community at best. On anything less than a huge rooftop antenna, the station is unwatchable — but, even if the underlying over-the-air signal was not valuable, the corresponding [[cable television]] slots in the various communities it was almost serving were. Any full-service domestic signal above some arbitrary minimum had access to "[[must carry]]" protection, could request favourable placement on the dial and (in Canada) could engage in [[signal substitution]] to take ad revenue from other stations already carrying the same content. The [[2016 United States wireless spectrum auction|2016-2020 OTA TV repack]] opened additional possibilities for using an outlying community's licence as an over-the-air placeholder. Buy a station, return the licensed broadcast spectrum to the government, then claim to be "sharing" a channel with another broadcaster by using the orphan licence to place content on one of their [[digital subchannel]]s. Suddenly, an outlying commercial low-power station in [[New Hampshire]] is "sharing" space on [[WGBX]], a full-power non-commercial station in the heart of the [[Boston]] market. The same transmitter can, by using two different licences in a "channel sharing" arrangement, have two different communities of licence - which may allow more flexibility for its location. It is also possible to mix commercial and non-commercial licences. In Canada, where [[CRTC]] regulations prevent carrying any additional, unique programming on digital subchannels without obtaining a second licence (and taking all the obligations which go with it) for each subchannel, returning just the spectrum (and keeping the licence) can be used as a means to recycle licences from abandoned, defunct outlying stations for use elsewhere in the network. {|class="wikitable" |- !Broadcaster !City !Community of license !Comments |- ||[[CIII-TV#Transmitters|CIII-TV-2]] ||[[Kingston, Ontario|Kingston]] ||[[Bancroft, Ontario]] ||One of the original six CKGN-TV transmitters from the initial net signon, claiming to be a fledgling [[Global Television Network]], in 1974. VHF 2 could not be assigned at Kingston (to protect [[WKTV]] [[Utica, New York|Utica]] and [[CBFT]] [[Montreal, Quebec|Montréal]]) or Toronto (to protect [[WGRZ]] [[Buffalo, New York|Buffalo]]) but could be built near tiny [[Addington Highlands|Denbigh]], from which it would barely reach a long list of communities from Kingston to Pembroke to Peterborough. {{efn|Using the B-grade contour of a full-power low-VHF analogue station to rimshot multiple communities creates a problem due to the digital television transition. The digital signal typically cannot replicate the original analogue low-VHF coverage area. The communities which the station "almost" reached in analogue will not be reached at all. Hence the temptation to not convert a station like CIII-TV-2, to defer its conversion through administrative means, relocate it or take it dark.}} The licence is at Bancroft, some 35 miles (55 km) further distant, as the closest incorporated town of any real size. The network's current owner, Corus, owns CHEX/CKWS and has moved Global's programming there, rendering Bancroft redundant, duplicative and superfluous — but wants to keep the desirable "cable 3" allocation which CIII-TV-2 held in a long list of [[rimshot (broadcasting)|"rimshot"]] communities. They intend to do so by using Bancroft's licence to operate a digital subchannel on a station which does not reach Bancroft. That will leave the same network running two different O&O's with the same content on different subchannels of the same transmitter, in a market which has already lost most of its Canadian OTA TV (CBC, SRC, TVO, CTV) and is only still viable for OTA due to cross-border reception of [[Watertown, New York|Watertown]] locals. |- ||[[CKWS-DT#Transmitters|CKWS-DT-2]] ||[[Ottawa, Ontario|Ottawa]] ||[[Prescott, Ontario]] ||CKWS-TV was a CBC TV affiliate in [[Kingston, Ontario]], from its 1954 inception until the network dumped its affiliate stations in 2015.<!-- The last CBC affiliate standing, [[CKSA-DT]], lost affiliation in 2016.--> It used to be carried on CATV systems as far north as Ottawa and as far south as [[Utica, New York]]. When the Ottawa cable system dropped CKWS to make room for more speciality channels, station management realised that many of the cable systems which carried CKWS 11 were under no [[must-carry|obligation to do so]]. Fearful of being dropped from cable in additional communities, they established three underpowered UHF rebroadcasters (26 Prescott, 36 Smiths Falls, 66 Brighton); as Canada licences [[broadcast translator|rebroadcasters]] as full-power stations, these had [[must-carry]] status everywhere from Brockville to Belleville. [[Corus Entertainment]], which has owned CHEX/CKWS since the turn of the millennium, acquired third-ranked [[Global Television Network]] from Shaw (a company under common control) in 2016, making the stations Global [[owned-and-operated station|O&O's]] in 2018. The tiny 130-watt Prescott-licensed digital UHF transmitter in [[Spencerville, Ontario|Spencerville]] is not valuable to the network, but the associated cable "must carry" status is - especially if the licence can be used to operate a [[digital subchannel]] on the commonly-owned Ottawa repeater CIII-DT-6 and reach the larger market.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2020/2020-391.htm|title=Various television stations – Licence amendments|date=December 4, 2020}}</ref> [[Gatineau, Quebec|Gatineau]] is [[Vidéotron]] territory and that company's proprietor [[Quebecor]] has obtained CRTC permission to not carry CKWS-TV{{efn|The dealings between [[Quebecor]] and rival CKWS TV are complex. Parent station [[CKWS-DT]] 11 was supposed to move to DT13 to protect [[CFTM-DT|Télé-Métropole]], [[TVA (Canadian TV network)|TVA's]] flagship French-language Montréal station, once that station is repacked from DT10 to DT11. In an unusual move (given the long history of Kingston-market VHF being pushed west/northwest to outlying communities to protect Montreal stations) the CRTC allowed CKWS to stay on DT11 and dump a limited amount of [[co-channel interference]] on the TVA owned-and-operated flagship. Québécor owns both Vidéotron cable and the TVA network, which may explain their desire not to carry CKWS-DT-2 on Vidéotron in Gatineau. The station that CKWS-TV claims to be trying to protect by staying on DT11? [[WNYI]], a satellite-fed repeater of [[Daystar (TV network)|Daystar]] which rebroadcasts brokered religious programming and originates nothing, but which nominally holds a full-service VHF TV license. As one further wrinkle, leaving CKWS-DT on 11 means that commonly owned-and-operated CIII-TV-2 Bancroft cannot go digital as its assigned repack channel was DT11. Instead, it will go dark; its licence will be assigned to a digital subchannel on CKWS's [[Wolfe Island, Ontario]], transmitter... which does not reach Bancroft over-the-air.}} - but nothing precludes Corus from using CKWS-DT-2's licence and a digital subchannel on the Ottawa transmitter to attempt to get back on [[Rogers Cable]] on the Ontario side of Ottawa. |- ||[[WNYI]] 52 [[Univisión]], now [[Daystar (TV network)|Daystar]] ||[[Syracuse, New York|Syracuse]] ||[[Ithaca, New York]] ||WNYI, which should itself focus on Ithaca, the home of [[Cornell University]], instead has been used to provide another network to the larger Syracuse market with little success. Launched by [[Equity Media Holdings]] as a [[Univision]] affiliate, it had no local programming and was [[centralcasting|centralcast]] out of Equity's hub in [[Little Rock, Arkansas]], with the only local contributions being limited local advertising. As [[Time Warner Cable]] already carried Univision's national cable feed and held [[local insertion]] rights for advertising over it, it had little incentive to carry WNYI, whose signal range was not city-grade into Syracuse, thus [[must-carry]] rights could not be invoked. WNYI also suffered from constant technical issues which could take weeks to repair as Equity maintained no local engineers or staff in their markets, earning the ire of the few providers who could receive it over the air, Univision, whose carriage was never fully assured and who dealt with Equity affiliates like WNYI who had no local presence whatsoever, the station's few local advertisers, who might not see their commercials carried at all due to a transmitter or computer issue (as often Equity's systems would accidentally carry commercials from a market far out-of-state), and viewers of those systems. Those providers eventually resorted to acquiring the signal of Equity stations through the same satellite feeds Equity used to feed the transmitters. As many of Equity's full-power stations signed on too late to receive a digital companion channel, they were forced to [[flash-cut]] to digital or go dark in 2009. Equity went bankrupt that year, at the height of the [[Great Recession]], having never [[flash-cut]] WNYI to digital. The station was sold in a bankruptcy sale with several others. Daystar, the new owner, had to build out the digital facilities themselves or forfeit the license after one year [[dark (broadcasting)|dark]]. Daystar also launched a translator, WDSS-LD, which served Syracuse itself. Eventually, it used the spectrum auction to build out a full-power transmitter from [[Moravia, New York|Moravia]] which transmits both WNYI and WDSS-LD, gaining must-carry rights. As with Equity, there has never been a local staff under Daystar ownership. As Daystar features a default national schedule and does not solicit advertising, there is no local content on the station. |} Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page