December 3 TV rescan

[Scott Fybush]

If only there were someone keeping track of all of these things and 
writing them up in (somewhat) concise fashion every week...

Here's what I wrote about this particular situation in the October 2 NERW:

"But those are all shares of commercial stations with other commercial 
stations, and the FCC is allowing some much stranger bedfellows, 
allowing noncommercial stations to yield up some of their bandwidth to 
provide bits that commercial TV stations can use (and pay for!) to stay 
on the air.

We’d initially thought that was all that was happening to WFXZ-CD 
(Channel 24), the Azteca America outlet that’s been running a 15 kW 
directional signal from the FM128 master tower site on Chestnut Street 
in Newton. The Rodriguez family collected a whopping $64 million in 
auction proceeds to give up RF 24. How much were they going to pay to 
have the WFXZ-CD signal hosted on some of the spectrum of WGBH (Channel 
2), after the market’s senior public TV station completed its own move 
from RF 19 down to the wastelands of low-VHF on RF 5?

As it turns out: WFXZ is paying nothing for its new home. That’s 
because, according to the channel-share plan recently filed with the 
FCC, the WFXZ-CD license is being donated to the WGBH Educational 
Foundation. WGBH is already in line for $162 million in auction proceeds 
for its move to low-VHF. It was also keeping a UHF signal via WGBX 
channel 44, which moves from RF 43 to 32 in the repack. And now, WGBH 
will end up with a third license in the market in the form of WFXZ. As a 
class A low-power station, the WFXZ license doesn’t come with any 
must-carry rights for cable or satellite, but it does at least come with 
that “commercial” designation, which means that WGBH could find a 
commercial tenant to lease out WFXZ’s portion of the new RF 5 signal for 
whatever viewers in the market can see it on low-VHF. (Or even use a 
for-profit subsidiary to operate WFXZ commercially itself; that’s 
something WGBH has done in the past with other non-broadcast ventures.)

WGBH isn’t alone in this deal – in Miami, public broadcaster WPBT is 
also getting a low-power commercial station via donation, which will 
give it the ability to use some of its repacked UHF spectrum 
commercially if it so chooses.

However this plays out, it will be part of a bigger set of changes at 
WGBH. As one of the industry’s innovation hubs, it’s a near-certainty 
that WGBH will use one of its signals in the short term as a market test 
bed for the new ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard. We’d expect that RF 5 will 
be used for that purpose, which probably means a swap at some point 
amidst the repack to put the familiar WGBH calls on what’s now the WGBX 
UHF license, which will likely be the new home for WGBH’s main 2.1 
channel. (Confused yet?)"

On 11/19/2017 12:05 PM, Mark Laurence wrote:
> I came across a message on WFXZ channel 24 telling viewers they’d have to rescan their TVs on December 3 if they want to continue to watch the over-the-air broadcast. Any idea what is happening then?
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
>