"Antenna Man" rakes WGBH over the coals

[Scott Fybush]

I don't get the animosity toward WGBH.

They resisted selling off their WGBX license for years, while almost every
other public TV entity took the fast cash and ran.

They could have gotten tens of millions for it when stations like WNED in
Buffalo and WMHT in Albany were unloading theirs.

Instead, they've played a very long game. They deliberately didn't sell
WGBX's spectrum, which means they still have a UHF ATSC 1 signal that's as
good as any in the market. The WGBH 2 programming is available that way for
anyone who can't get the RF 5 signal.

And guess what? Once the ATSC 3 transition gets moving in earnest, it's a
good bet the WGBH license will be used for ATSC 3. Which means while other
broadcasters with only one license have to scramble to find channel-sharing
partners to maintain dual ATSC 1/3 operations, WGBH will be all set
internally.

And once ATSC 1 sunsets, which could be years from now yet, WGBH can move
the ATSC 3 signal to UHF and *still* have another 6 MHz of VHF spectrum for
more ATSC 3 data.

They're thinking several moves ahead on the chessboard compared to most of
the industry. I don't hate them for that. I admire them for it.

On Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 3:12 PM George Allen <geo.allen@comcast.net> wrote:

> Yeah, they really took the $ and ran.  And...
> they get ongoing $$ from NBC10 by renting out
> RF32 (wgbx) to NBC10 for 15-1 and 15-2.  So they
> cashed out twice at OTA viewer's
> expense.  Somehow that seems not right, even if
> legal.  Cord-cutting is rampant [I'm one of
> them], so tho maybe at one time OTA wasn't a big
> deal, it's a bigger deal now.  Why don't they
> just stream HDTV over the web?  Doesn't solve it
> for everyone but would make me happy.
>
> I have mixed emotions about all this.  It was a
> good deal for them and raised a lot of cash.  The
> Q is: what are they going to do with all that moola?
>     George
>
>
> From: Richard Chonak <richard@chonak.com>
> Date: Wed, 15 Jul 2020 00:22:41 -0400
> Subject: "Antenna Man" rakes WGBH over the coals
>
> The "Antenna Man" of Bethlehem, PA usually
> devotes his YouTube videos to testing TV
> antennas, and rating their performance at his location in the Poconos.
>
> Viewers all over the country ask him for advice,
> so in a video released July 14, he devoted an
> episode to explaining the FCC spectrum auction
> that led to many changes in reception.
>
> In particular, he zeroed in on PBS stations that
> took big payouts to move to low-VHF
> frequencies.  The prime example, of course, is
> WGBH's move to RF channel 5, and the $218M
> jackpot the auction yielded for it. Lamenting the
> poorer service which the public got, he shows a
> list of a dozen or so station employees with
> salaries running up to $400,000 and beyond it.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrFib1jaBP0
>
> --RC
>
>
>