Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Television/Television stations task force

Requested move at Talk:Disney Junior#Requested move 1 June 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Disney Junior#Requested move 1 June 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Safari Scribe^{Edits! Talk!} 00:43, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:ABC News#Requested move 18 June 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:ABC News#Requested move 18 June 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Векочел (talk) 11:44, 19 June 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Lifetime (TV network)#Requested move 24 July 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Lifetime (TV network)#Requested move 24 July 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 02:50, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:ABC News (United States)#Requested move 1 August 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:ABC News (United States)#Requested move 1 August 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. TarnishedPath^talk 07:50, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company#Requested move 12 August 2024

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company#Requested move 12 August 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Safari Scribe^{Edits! Talk!} 05:59, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

Are MyNetworkTV affiliates essentially independent stations now?

Pinging @Sammi Brie, Nathan Obral, Mer764Wiki, and AdamDeanHall: Should we get rid of the category and state navboxes? Mvcg66b3r (talk) 14:54, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

My two-cents on this topic:

Okay, this is confusing, honestly, Sammi Brie does make a good point about it.

... About my reasoning, it's more like the fact of the branding, and the programming. It's considered (even by Fox themselves) as just a "programming service". Now about the branding, locally, KSMO (Channel 62) brands itself by its callsign, in a way the last time IT branded as MyKSMO was in 2011 (I think).

Meanwhile, like 4 hours east of Kansas City, Missouri is St. Louis, Missouri. Until this year KMOV's 4.3 subchannel was used for MyNetworkTV under the MyNetworkTV St. Louis name until it moved to 32.1, rebranded as Matrix Midwest, and became a Sports-focused station. Also, in Missouri, KXNW (Licensed to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, in a whole different market) is.. well, branded as KXNW, St. Joesph and Joplin doesn't have one, as well as in Ottumwa and Hannibal and in Cape Girardeau, WDKA (Licensed to Paduka, Kentucky) is branded as My49. In Kansas, KSAS-DT2, and WIBW-DT2 brands with MyTV. (Note, WIBW-DT2 does most air MeTV under the MeTV Topaka branding, so that doesn't count per se.)

So yea... I say, okay. Also you really putted me in that Coconut tree. But I was there (and here) for a certain propose. mer764KCTV5 / Cospaw the Wolf (He/Him | Talk! • Contributions) 17:09, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

I can't believe it. Just this week, I was writing a possible RfC on this topic. Because of this, I do have a lot of material available.

In 2006, Fox Television Stations launched MyNetworkTV, which at the time was a television network offering original, first-run programming to its affiliates. Formed in the upheaval of the UPN–WB merger that formed The CW (and left Fox's UPN affiliates out), stations generally branded with the network, and some changed their call signs to suit. Fox Television Stations, beginning in the 2009–10 season, converted MyNetworkTV to a programming service. While it still fed the same amount of program content to affiliates, MyNetworkTV no longer offered first-run programs as of April 2010. In that time, the prominence of MyNetworkTV branding, including and most especially at stations owned by Fox, has steadily decreased. Fox Television Stations owns and operates eleven unique MyNetworkTV stations, but only one as of September 2024 brands fully with the network as it did in 2006. Some affiliates, including O&Os, no longer air it in prime time. Even Fox Corporation's annual report differentiates between the two. It states that The FOX Network is a premier national television broadcast network with "affiliates" but calls MyNetworkTV a programming distribution service with "licensee stations" (pp. 8, 10). Further copy distinguishes affiliations and licensing arrangements.

Most affiliates of MyNetworkTV in the top 25 DMAs outside of the aforementioned Fox-owned stations also do not use the MyNetworkTV branding. Of the following 12 stations, 5 use the MyNetworkTV original logo style and a sixth is branded as "My" with a custom logo. There is no affiliate in Boston or Miami.

MyNetworkTV non-owned affiliates in the top 25 DMAs

City	Station	Brand/Notes
Philadelphia	WPHL-TV 17.2	Antenna TV (shared with a diginet). When on main channel, had no My branding.
Atlanta	WATL	The ATL
Tampa	WSNN-LD	SNN
Detroit	WADL	My 38
Denver	KTVD	KTVD 20
Cleveland	WOIO 19.2	MeTV (shared with a diginet)
Sacramento	KQCA	My 58 (custom logo) (also CW)
Portland	KPDX	Fox 12 Plus
St. Louis	KMOV 32.1	Matrix Midwest
Raleigh-Durham	WRDC	My RDC
Charlotte	WMYT-TV	My 12
Indianapolis	WNDY-TV	My 23 WNDY

In some but not all cases, MyNetworkTV stations are becoming contractually indistinguishable from independents when it comes time to collect retransmission consent revenue. Beginning in 2023, the contract between the National Cable Television Cooperative and the E. W. Scripps Company no longer considers MyNetworkTV stations "netlet" affiliates (e.g. The CW stations). On the other hand, the last known Nexstar Media Group retransmission contract for 2024–26 equated The CW, MyNetworkTV, and Telemundo. It is hard to prove this conclusively because retrans contracts, usually confidential, are only publicly available in extremely fleeting circumstances.

There is also precedent in American television history. The Prime Time Entertainment Network existed from 1993 to 1995, though most of its affiliates were secondary in nature. Unlike with the later UPN and The WB, stations did not brand with the network at all, and the stations were still generally considered independents.

Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 15:33, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

In the interest of full disclosure, Sammi Brie informed me days earlier about the RfC possibility. And I agree. There is nothing distinguishable about MyNetworkTV; it's just a two-hour rerun block that the majority of affiliates (such as they are) bury in late-hours or even graveyard slots.

Not wanting to fully belabor Sammi's argument, but just think about these things:

• Both WBFS-TV and WSBK-TV, in top 20 markets, abruptly dropped MyNet with no notice or anything and removed the "My" branding from their logos. Neither move had any coverage in local media or in the trades. WBFS is even a good article and yet this still couldn't be cited with enough confidence, only with a trade article from two years later that mentioned their independent status.
• WOIO-DT2 picked up MyNet in the middle of the night at some point in 2019 after WUAB (which also carried it in the graveyard slot after picking up The CW) dropped it, displacing reruns of Cannon and Barnaby Jones on MeTV's lineup. No one mentioned it in local media. I doubt anyone noticed and I could barely cite it with the RabbitEars citation when I redid the WOIO article. (This also makes you wonder how long a contract Gray signed for MyNet, given Matrix Midwest is somehow saddled with this program block.)
• KICU-TV is a station in a top 10 market and there was no mention of that station—again, owned by Fox—actually picking up the network. KRON, the prior affiliate, also buried it in late night and made no announcement of it being removed.

Basically, for individual station articles, the mention of MyNetworkTV should mostly be, if not exclusively, limited to when it was a network between 2006 and 2009. If it can be verified anywhere else than just a RabbitEars listing (no, Facebook or other social media posts don't count, and neither do links to TitanTV), then one could say said station "is an independent station with MyNetworkTV programming" in the lede. But it is getting more and more impossible to find reliable coverage of a station or digital subchannel assuming or removing MyNet, because it frankly doesn't merit SIGCOV.

Bottom line: unless proven otherwise by a reliable source, the affiliates of MyNet are otherwise independent stations or full-on affiliates with said diginet, and that includes in subchannel tables. Remove the categories and nav boxes, and put List of MyNetworkTV affiliates up for AfD. (The main MyNetworkTV article needs a massive cleanup and trimdown, but that's a whole other story lol.) Nathan Obral • he/him • t • c • 19:55, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

• It's become clear over the last few years that MNTV has become basically a vector for indies to have a bunch of branding files and two hours of programming a night; nothing more than that, but the move of it to the latest possible timeslot on KICU and the end of its primacy on WPWR now means outside one station, WWOR, it's nothing more even to its prime affiliate group than a way for NBCUniversal to get national distribution for a rerun package in a 'five kids in a trenchcoat' way disguising itself as a network. I don't even consider it primary for any station unless it's from 8-10 p.m. where it's supposedly meant to be and for many of these stations, it was odd to have to tell someone 'if WOIO-DT2 runs it way in late night on MeTV, why on earth would you consider the latter secondary?'. A normal person would do the 168-10 math and tell you 'it's the MeTV station', with only the overly Comic Book Guy-like industry insider saying 'actually, their main 'network' is MNTV'.
• There are still stations who brand in full with it, like WVTV's DT2 and many small town stations that barely budget for on-air imaging, but for the most part, it's been quiet disaffiliations like WACY's, then an ignoble slotting in the late night of something like WBAY's the365 sub, Dabl or The Nest. Even if we still had media writers like we did in the 2000s reporting on these moves, they'd barely bat an eye at the mention of it departing like WSBK. Hell, I confused WPHL's removal of the network earlier this year not even knowing it shifted to Antenna TV's late night, but it didn't feel like it was that egregious of an error like I would if I botched a format description on a radio article, though I apologized for it nonetheless.
• Honestly at this point, it's becoming more of a footnote for a programming section than something to note in the lede; I felt it strained believability to call KICU an affiliate, because FAIAP it really isn't and if KTVU could, they'd throw it on their Nosey subchannel and just let it go quietly into that goodnight. I agree that the MNTV article still describes mere hopes for a competitive network in 2006, rather than what it turned out to be and needs to be cut down, and the affiliate list and cats should go now. It's pretty much the same how I feel about YTA TV (at least until HC2 began to gobble up its stations to create robo-feeds); yes, it's a network, but it's plain not competitive and it's damned clear now that after so long, a shift to sports like The CW has undergone isn't in the offing; it's just 'there' and Ion just feels more like a network with some local station quirks more than MNTV does. Nate • (chatter) 22:40, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

Quote from Nathan Obral: "WOIO-DT2 picked up MyNet in the middle of the night at some point in 2019 after WUAB (which also carried it in the graveyard slot after picking up The CW) dropped it, displacing reruns of Cannon and Barnaby Jones on MeTV's lineup. No one mentioned it in local media. I doubt anyone noticed and I could barely cite it with the RabbitEars citation when I redid the WOIO article. (This also makes you wonder how long a contract Gray signed for MyNet, given Matrix Midwest is somehow saddled with this program block.)"

Same thing with WIBW-DT2 in the (nearby) market of Topeka, Kansas, but WIBW-DT2 had MeTV since like ... 2012, with MyNetworkTV being on 1‐3 a.m. with most of the programming being MeTV programs. mer764KCTV5 / Cospaw the Wolf (He/Him | Talk! • Contributions) 00:25, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

I think we've been hamstrung by the fact that there are still at least some sources that, when they do exist (which, as previously mentioned, is not a sure thing), continue to refer to "MyNetworkTV affiliates" the way they would for affiliates of the larger/actual networks. (Most subchannel tables, for instance, are sourced to RabbitEars, which still lists affiliates of "MyN" — its shorthand for MyNetworkTV — as such rather than "independent".) Per policy, Wikipedia has to defer to (verifiable proof in) outside reliable sources; it cannot blaze its own trail. Not helping is that there are some who insist that the usage of "My" branding is the indicator of affiliation, rather than the presence of the service's programming on the lineup — there have been recent edits to WPWR-TV in that realm (some of which have even gone as far as to deem the new "Fox Chicago Plus" branding as the "affiliation", which isn't how this works), which is probably what led to this discussion. That's a matter that even some affiliates themselves have tripped up on — KZJO, before it was owned by Fox Television Stations, actually claimed in the mid-2010s that KZJO-TV was branded JOEtv after its affiliation as a MYNetwork station ended. (It never actually ended entirely; the service's programming had actually been bumped from primetime into late night [but not off the station altogether], and this is not unique to Seattle — the aforementioned WPWR has now done the same, among many others.)

Further complicating matters: even from the start, MyNetworkTV always seemed to blur the line between "syndication" and "network". It was originally a joint venture between Fox Television Stations and syndicator then-sibling Twentieth Television, and not long after the initial announcement a media agency CEO was quoted as calling MyNetworkTV a syndicator with a group deal in an article in Broadcasting & Cable that went on to compare it to PTEN and the even earlier Operation Prime Time. On the other hand, MyNetworkTV was Nielsen-rated as a network before the 2009 programming service conversion, at which time its programs were instead rated as syndicated shows — I don't think OPT or PTEN came anywhere near attaining "network-rated" status. I strongly suspect the combination of those first three years as more of a "network", the fact that they did not stop calling it "MyNetworkTV" after it stopped actually being a "network" (which only sends mixed messages about that status), and the very, very gradual demise of the "My" branding at the affiliate level during the 2010s and 2020s (another thing PTEN et.al. never had, and a decline that did not necessarily start in 2009 — it took until the mid-to-late 2010s for Fox to start phasing out the branding from its MyNetworkTV stations, though other companies did start earlier) is why the assertion that any of these stations still have anything resembling a "network affiliation" has persisted this long, despite all the circumstantial evidence (increasingly non-primetime and later and later clearances; brand extension or independent-style branding; more and more exiles to subchannels, sometimes preempting an otherwise-24/7 diginet) to the contrary. (To an extent, this is actually the opposite problem as with the early years of the sister Fox network itself — its affiliates were still labeled "independent" in some contexts into the early 1990s.) I certainly would not consider the stations carrying MyNetworkTV to be anything other than "independent stations" today, but whether Wikipedia can accurately reflect this, and when the cut-off is (assuming it isn't the logical spot of the 2009 programming service conversion, which Fox did announce way back then), is certainly a good question with no easy answers. WCQuidditch ☎ ✎ 22:00, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

This is definitely the fly in the soup, that for most normal people writing about TV, they just see the My lineup and assume 'yeah, it's that', but the cutoff is so unclear. Honestly, I consider this Deadline article in July 2021 as the last true mention of it in known sources of what it was considered, then everything else has been in the ether since then, with this article about it getting Suits (which weren't even exclusive rights as they're also in weeknight syndication) the last mention of it in mainstream press (the current-day News search is just packed with AI hallucinatory pink slime from IMDb about True Crime News, which is just plain syndicated). It's just hard to define a cut-off, but I'm not going to say 2009 because they were trying an Ion direction, but it fell apart over time with Sinclair's local sports effort, Fox's Plus effort and other issues in the industry where syndication went from full and vital to repeats of repeats these days. Nate • (chatter) 22:40, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

This is the issue, really. Our coverage of local broadcasting in the United States, and I can speak on this with ample experience of some 300 TV stations improved to GA or FA quality, suffers from the tailing off in coverage after the mid-2000s, a victim of the Great Recession and of the nationalization of the key ways people engage with TV. Every major and even many mid-size cities had columnists like Alan Pergament (Buffalo) and John Kiesewetter (Cincinnati) who covered developments in broadcasting, but now the aforementioned pair are among the last of a nearly extinct breed. Wikipedia, as a result, finds itself in the impossible position of balancing how a diminishing number of reliable sources act (based sometimes on itself as an input!) with how things just are.

In many ways, the decay of MyNetworkTV branding at affiliates reminds me of something like Ground Round, whose article I rescued earlier this year. It was once a clearly coherent whole, but its central structure fell away, leaving the outposts to cling on to the system and the brand and creating obvious inconsistency and attrition as local stations adopted new programming and promotional strategies of which they were more clearly in control. This is an unusually exciting time for the secondary TV stations that were the staple of MyNetworkTV and The CW. The return of local sports to broadcast television has given new life to existing indies that have suddenly taken on dozens of games a year, as they did 20 or 30 years ago (e.g. KTVD), and is even birthing a new generation (KMCC Vegas 34 and all the Scripps sports-based indies, Arizona's Family Sports, KMPX KFAA-TV in Dallas–Fort Worth, KUNS and soon KUNP within Sinclair, etc.). Meanwhile, syndicated entertainment television has become a shell of its former self, and programming airing on something like MyNetworkTV is just part of larger, much more aggregated, multichannel strategies by rightsholders to monetize library content (this might include cable, FAST, premium streaming, broadcast syndication).

The comparison to the early years of Fox but in reverse is kind of apt, though of course the lines were a lot clearer with Fox's progressive expansion. As I wrote in a footnote at KASN, Fox affiliates continued to be considered independent stations for a number of years after Fox launched, particularly as Fox did not program a full seven-night schedule early on. The Fox owned-and-operated stations did not leave the trade association for independent stations, INTV, until 1992. We do not have that bright line here, but in this case, we may need to set the bright line. Sammi Brie (she/her • t • c) 02:25, 30 September 2024 (UTC)

@Wcquidditch and Sammi Brie: There are two specific points where you can legit say MyNet stopped being a network in any practical sense:

• When this Hollywood Reporter article from February 2009 about MyNet "changing [their] business model" has as it's first sentence: MyNetworkTV no longer is a broadcast network. Even this article explicitly makes clear that NBC Universal receives half the advertising inventory for "Criminal Intent," so MyNet doesn't actually pay for the content. The other 50% goes toward MyNet stations, the bulk of which are owned by Fox.
• In the fall of 2010, when WWE Smackdown, their last non-rerun program of any sort, moved to SyFy.

While MyNet already had given up airing first-run scripted content in 2007, they initially switched to repurposed content from Fox Reality Channel and movies—the only "new" program of any sort was Smackdown—Fox still got a portion of the revenue, not an outside provider like NBCU. What does make this tricky is that The CW has been airing reruns of The Conners in their primetime block as backfill due to a move by Nexstar to air cheaper imported content and sports. But no one is going to question that The CW is still a network. Nathan Obral • he/him • t • c • 14:43, 30 September 2024 (UTC)