December 3 TV rescan

[A Joseph Ross]

I'm plenty confused, but maybe there's one thing you can clear up 
easily:  What does the CD stand for in WFXZ-CD?

On 11/19/2017 4:01 PM, Scott Fybush wrote:
> 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
>>
>

-- 
A. Joseph Ross, J.D. · 1340 Centre Street, Suite 103 · Newton, MA 02459
617.367.0468 · Fax:617.507.7856 · http://www.attorneyross.com