Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Major Re-Organization By Time Warner, and Radio Ratings

We won't spend much time on the latter...because our big focus is on the former...

TWC Re-Organizing Channels Here: We first saw the required FCC notice on Time Warner's Cincinnati-area website, stating that a bunch of channels were about to be dropped, moved or added. Here's the page if you're interested. We didn't post it because we did not have a hard date, or confirmation that these would even occur. Now we do...it'll be August 25, reports John Kiesewetter. And local PBS members/viewers won't be happy in either Dayton OR Cincinnati.

Here's some of what's going to happen, per that page, and there's a lot:

--Sundance from Movie Tier to Digital Variety
--WXIX/19 Newport, WKRC/12, WLWT/5, WCPO/9, WCET/48, WCVN/54 Covington and WPTD/16 Dayton HD channels move to between 1003 and 1021. All but WCVN and WPTD still will have a basic cable presence...with WPTD being moved in Butler, Warren and Clinton (see below). WCVN KET1 (or main feed) to channel 980. Also, WCVN KET2 to 981, and WCVN KET4 to 982. No word on KET3.
--WCPO Weather Tracker to channel 373, with WLWT Weather Plus to 371
--CinCW (aka Local12.2 WKRC-DT2) to channel 989
--This TV Cincy to channel 994
--In Butler, Warren and Clinton Counties, WPTD replaced by HSN on Channel 16. WPTD moves to Channel 990.

But...a few of these moves take channels OFF the basic cable side. WCVN won't be available, and neither will WPTD. In fact, WPTO/14 Oxford also loses EVERY SINGLE subchannel.

And if you're in Adams County and are served by Time Warner...you could potentially lose another PBS channel. WPBO/Portsmouth is listed in the "may have to drop in the future" category.

Kiese reports that management at Public Media Connect (aka the merged 48/14/16 operation) will meet with Time Warner management Thursday. As you can imagine, nobody at the new Public Media Connect is very happy with this move. And neither is KET...either its viewers in southwest Ohio, or the management THERE. We're looking to find someone at KET to talk to...more on this story next week...and more on WHY next week at the end of this quickie...

Radio Ratings Out: As mentioned, we're not gonna spend much time here. But we wanted to give everybody the gist of the top few in ratings...

--WLW-AM 700/Cincinnati was, of course, number one in town with the vanity 12+ numbers.
--WUBE-FM 105.1/Cincinnati was #3 with all listeners.
--WGRR-FM 103.5/Cincinnati rose from #4 to #2, as WKRC-AM 550, WRRM-FM 98.5, WEBN-FM 102.7, and WKFS-FM 107.1/Cincinnati tied at 4th.

If you want a bit more in-depth breakdown, we suggest heading over to the Kiese Blog.

Finally, A Quick Note: Barring any major breaking developments, this will be the closeout item for July due to personal issues. We'll return August 4. Until then, if you have tips, send them to us. The link is below our Twitter feed on the right side.

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