A bit of a weird TV situation in my area. Here NBC has been carried on Channel 4 since 1953, and CBS has been carried on Channel 7 since 1956. Suddenly and with little advance notice Channel 7 is dropping CBS and becoming the local CW affiliate. And the company that currently runs our NBC affiliate has picked up the dropped CBS rights. So now it will run NBC on broadcast channel 4.1 and CBS on 4.3. The same local news programs will be aired on both the NBC and the CBS subchannels. It just seems odd to me, two of the three major traditional broadcasters which are most places and times direct competitors now being digital substations of the same channel, alongside MeTV.
(Apparently CBS wanted more money for their programming than the 70-year affiliate was willing to pay.)
Something similar happened in Minneapolis/St Paul during the late '70s. IIRC, channel 5 KMSP jumped from NBC to ABC. Channel 9 KSTP, which had been affiliated with ABC, became independent, and channel 11 WTCN, which had been independent, was picked up by NBC. In the '80s, the last was redesignated WUSA, and ultimately WKTN (“The kitten that roared!” ) when the NBC affiliate in Washington, DC, assumed the WUSA label.
A couple of decades ago, Cleveland’s channels 8 and 19 swapped (Fox and… NBC, I think?). I’m not sure why, and I don’t remember what they did with their local news crews.
Similarly, in Miami-Fort Lauderdale, WPLG channel 10 and ABC broke up. WSVN channel 7, our major Fox affiliate, now carries ABC on a subchannel. WPLG has gone all-in on news, plus some local programming and sports.
This type of network shopping/switching used to be very common back in the day. Local stations depend less on network programming than most people realize. Local news, local programs, and cheap syndicated stuff often bring in far more money from local advertisers. Over long periods of time the networks take turns having the most desired shows so even if a station owner is panting after NBC when they owned Thursdays or CBS when they dominated Saturdays what happens in the next decade may not lure eyeballs in the same way. That’s why they promote local news so heavily and try to make their news teams household names.
Going way back, Rochester had only two channels throughout the 1950s, NBC and CBS. They would each run some ABC programs. Finally a third channel opened up and allowed a full ABC lineup. The competition for the Big 2 was fierce.
It isn’t the network switching that is weird to me, it is having two of the major broadcast networks on the “same channel”, CBS lowered to a “point” subchannel.
That says more about the lame duck nature of network stations and cable becoming the almost universal way of accessing them. They matter so little that this type of switch can be made today when it would have been unthinkable a few decades ago.
) when the NBC affiliate in Washington, DC, assumed the WUSA label.