LPTV In Atlanta, Portland Live Or Die By OTA

For the last week or so, I’ve retreated from the full cable television experience, mainly because the picture on my Sharp HD television — scarcely four years old — began to look like an Andy Warhol painting. A bad main board, a repairman told me, as if I know from main boards.

Mr. Sharp, if you’re reading, let this be an example of word-of-mouth advertising.

Since deciding to spend $300 to fix it, I’ve had to content myself — a good phrase, I guess — with watching TV from an old, tiny, analog portable hooked into basic cable that gets Philadelphia channels and a few cable networks.

And I realized something: I’m a pretty good television watcher, but, overwhelmingly, I watch broadcast TV and video from the Internet.

Most of the rest of the stuff I get from my Comcast Kitchen-Sink-Plus service is wasted on me. I really ought to quit cable, get myself a good antenna, and see how it feels.

In Portland, Ore., and in Atlanta, two operators of low-power TV stations would like to see that. In fact, they would like to see everybody unshackle themselves from wires and dishes.

In Atlanta, Vince Castelli runs Prism TV, which owns two LPs, WANN and the WTBS (yes, the call letters once owned by Ted Turner). Making use their multicasting capability, the stations offer a variety of services like the Oldie Goldie vintage movie network, ThisTV, LATV and France 24, an English-language, but obviously French news service.    

Castelli, like other people in the LP sphere, is passionate about his business and especially over-the-air TV mainly because LPs don’t have must carry rights. They can’t force cable systems to carry any of their services and most don’t. Of course, retrans fees are only a dream.

Castelli likes to point people toward his website, freetvatlanta.com. It lists some 70 OTA channels available in that market. The website says that’s more than any other city except Los Angeles.

Twenty of those channels are TV services from WANN and WTBS and another 20 are dedicated WANN-WTBS simulcasts of Atlanta radio stations, though only about half of those “radio on TV” channels are up and running.

“Why pay hundreds of dollars every year to watch your favorite channels?” the website asks, a question that is a lot more potent now as cable and satellite rates go up, and consumers worry about $4 a gallon gasoline and a weak economy.

Another page points out that a viewer could see Glee or American Idol on over-the-air Fox for free, along with more obscure services like Tuff-TV, a sports channel offered on one of the WANN subchannels. WANN’s own website gives viewers tips on how to install their own antennas.

The fact is, if you were to go OTA, it would be to watch the major networks, not Oldie Goldie or ThisTV or Jewelry TV. Still it’s true, when Castelli says, “We’ve got channels you can’t get on cable.”

Castelli, who prefers to call himself the stations’ media coordinator, says he’s now working on a deal to buy a “container-load of inexpensive, high-quality antennas in the next 30 days” and by using the barter time he gets on those radio stations, advertise them to viewers. He talks about mounting an old-fashioned “grass roots campaign, knocking on front doors” to sell antennas.

He thinks all of Atlanta is his market, not just poorer people, and makes the perfectly valid point that OTA HD looks a lot better than when it gets delivered via cable or satellite.

He does point out Atlanta’s Hispanic population increased by an amazing 50% in the last decade, that Hispanics are statistically more likely to be over-the-air viewers than the general population and that WANN carries several Hispanic channels.

In Portland, Greg Herman operates four low-power channels through his WatchTV. He’s convinced that full-power broadcasters no longer want to encourage consumers to receive TV over the air because of the retransmission consent deals they have made with cable and satellite operators.

These low power guys say it’s not in affiliates’ immediate financial interest to encourage anybody to cut the cable chord. They can enjoy that swim in that dual revenue stream just like CNN or any other cable network. Encouraging viewers to hook up to an antenna might damage the business arrangement they now have with cable operators.  

“They’re allowing a different business to control their business,” Herman says. “They’re abdicating their service to cable and satellite operator. These guys have been neutered by the cable industry. Retransmission consent fees are their crack cocaine. History will prove me right.”

Herman, who’s applied for, and been denied, experimental licenses by the FCC, is a passionate broadcaster who worries that the commission will repack the broadcast spectrum to give more to wireless operators.

The fall guys will be not only be low-power outlets like his, but also other broadcasters that are weaker echoes of what they once were.

It won’t be easy for low-power broadcasters to amass huge audiences by relying on people with antennas. In Atlanta, Castelli estimates the OTA crowd at just 10% of the population. Not being on cable and not having many possible OTA viewers, he says, “keep me in a straitjacket.”

In Portland, where there’s a stick-it-to-the-man attitude within the sizeable granola populace there, Herman estimates the OTA audience is as much as 14%.

Herman says he’s quite sure that at any point, he has 60,000-100,000 viewers, but that’s a guess. He says he’s operating his channels “pretty much on my own dime.”

“I’ve had one cable operator tell me, ‘Why would I want to enable a competitor if I don’t have to? I sell low-cost advertising too,'” Herman says. “In all fairness, I see the point. You know, don’t get mad at a lion if he eats you. That’s what they do.”

Market Share by P.J. Bednarski, all about TV sales and TV sales people, appears every other week in TVNewsCheck. Bednarski is longtime TV reporter and a former top editor at TV Week and B&C. If you have comments on this column or ideas for future ones, contact him at [email protected]. Read earlier Market Share columns here.