NBC Boston

[RabbitEars Webmaster]

Scott,

WBTS-LD is moving itself into Providence on channel 36, so WBTS-LD will 
not be sharing.  (Presumably, it will host WRIW-CD in the long term.)  
Additionally, virtual channel 8 will not be available to WNEU either 
because it will overlap with WMTW, while the low-power and directional 
WBTS-LD signal does not.

My suspicion is that NBC will remain as 15-1, but on the WNEU signal.

- Trip
www.rabbitears.info

On 09/25/2018 01:50 PM, Scott Fybush wrote:
> There were reasons, even if they were obscure ones.
>
> For the OTA signal from WBTS-LD, "10.x" was not an option because of WJAR.
> 13.x was also unavailable because of WGME in Portland, which has a tiny bit
> of overlap of its signal into the WBTS coverage area.  I guess WMTW is just
> slightly more distant, which is how WBTS got 8.x.
>
> But... Comcast believed (correctly, IMO) that OTA is of only very minor
> importance in the Boston market. So the real branding goal was to get a
> common identity on cable and satellite across the market.
>
> My recollection is that "8" was not available all across the market on
> cable/satellite. But "10" was.
>
> And for all that we freak out about it here, the real world impact of the
> Boston/Providence overlap is not so severe. If you live in the Boston TV
> market and you're among the 90% or so with cable/satellite, you tune to
> "10" and you get NBC Boston. If you get WJAR on your cable at all, it's up
> on 96 or 99, not on "10".
>
> If you're in Bristol County, you're not a Boston market viewer. When you
> punch in "10" on cable and get WJAR, Comcast doesn't care, because your
> viewership doesn't count in the NBC Boston market.
>
> So we're down to the 10% of households that are OTA, and for them Comcast
> is buying time until it can finish playing out the long game. WYCN-via-WGBX
> and WBTS-LD are stopgap moves until WNEU's full-power signal moves down
> from New Hampshire. My assumption is that WBTS will end up channel sharing
> on WNEU as 8.x, and that will be the full-power NBC OTA signal, almost at
> parity with WBZ/WCVB/WFXT.
>
> Even then, it will still be "NBC10," because the vast majority of its
> viewers will see it by punching in "10."
>
> If there's still a bit of confusion among the small percentage of OTA
> viewers in the small chunk of the market that gets both WJAR and NBC
> Boston, it affects maybe 1-2% of the market's households.  Still not ideal,
> but also not very relevant.  If WJAR gets a few eyeballs in Stoughton or
> WBTS in Attleboro, neither counts in the ratings anyway... and so nobody's
> all that worried.
>
> On Tue, Sep 25, 2018, 1:16 PM Jim Hall <aerie.ma@comcast.net> wrote:
>
>> I wonder if the strange situation of NBC in Boston has happened anywhere
>> else in the country? Here we have WBTS-LD operating on Ch 46, with PSIP to
>> Ch 8, but sloganing as NBC10, even though a good part of the market can
>> pick
>> up WJAR-TV. Backed up by WYCN-CD, originally in Nashua and technically
>> Class
>> A, but now operating at full power by channel sharing with WGBX, from the
>> same tower as WBTS-LD. Backed up again by WNEU-DT2 in New Hampshire. Since
>> WBTS and WYCN are on the same tower, what's the point of having both of
>> them?  And why do they slogan as NBC10 with another Channel 10 forty miles
>> away, when they could have used 8 or 13 for their slogan and avoided
>> confusion?
>>
>>
>>
>> Ditto WYDN from Worcester now channel sharing with WPXG in Concord NH and
>> being licensed to Lowell MA.
>>
>>