WHDH-DT Now Simulcasting

[Mark Laurence]

On Wednesday, June 17, 2009, at 10:28AM, "Larry Weil" <kc1ih@mac.com> wrote:
>At 12:49 AM -0400 6/17/09, Mark Laurence wrote:
>
>>Meanwhile, channel 27 really ought to consider putting English on 
>>one or more of their subchannels.  They can build a decent audience 
>>with all the Worcester County people whose digital converters can 
>>only find this signal.
>
>English what?  If you are suggesting that they produce a channel for 
>their subchannel audience only, I doubt that would be economically 
>viable.  The majority of people in Worcester are on cable anyway, and 
>probably would not watch such a channel very much even if Charter 
>picked it up.

If you surveyed the TV-marooned market in Worcester, I'm sure
you'd discover there were thousands of households, some in
pockets of the city but also largely in the suburbs and rural towns.
You would also discover that population was overwhelmingly English
speaking.  

At this point, there's no competition for these thousands of viewers.
You can put literally anything on (well, maybe not home shopping or
paid religion) and they'll watch.  

I'm suggesting there must be some satellite feed that costs practically
nothing, like RTV or This TV, maybe showing 60's sitcom reruns and old 
movies, that might be watched by people who find it's the only English 
program their new digital converters can pick up.  Maybe there is
some no-cost programming like the Deutsche Welle English stuff
on WHDN.  

I don't know if it will make money, but there's got to be some kind of
potential there.  There are many reasons people get marooned and it's
not always because they're dirt poor or otherwise demographically un-
desirable. You'd probably end up with a more desirable audience than 
some of the exotic digital cable channels and many of the existing
local indy broadcast channels who are trying to compete in the 250 
channel world.  At any rate, I'm sure it would get a bigger audience 
and make more money than a Spanish language subchannel on 27.