It is easy to let the conspiracy theory portion of my mind to run wild hearing the news and, more importantly seeing the list of television stations now going dark due to the recent FCC auction. This was especially true when I say WYCC-Channel 20 of Chicago on the list. Channel 20 was an part of that “Children of a lesser PBS” crowd. They didn’t get the first run PBS shows, at least not the big hits. I remember seeing it when it first came on-line, quite by accident, flipping through some channels. It carried courses for City College and some children’s educational stuff.
Some of you have probably seen my posts on how to cut the cord with today’s antenna television. When you start seeing those $100+/month cable/satellite bills it is really tempting, especially since you can put up a deep fringe antenna for around $100 yourself. The featured image of this post is a report I ran at tvfool.com. Nice little service. Give them your address/gps coordinates and height of antenna and they will generate a similar report for you. Of particular interest is the VHF box. This is the frequency some of the stations opted to move to after their frequency was auctioned. IT SUCKS!
I have never understood CBS, especially in the Chicago market. They have always had the suckiest transmitters. VHF is nigh on impossible to pick up at any great distance. In order to watch NCIS, Bull and NCIS New Orleans I have to point my antenna to the south. Barring lots of bad weather I can generally get a nice clean signal from the UHF band, but VHF is iffy on a good day.
One thing which was nice about the “Children of a Lesser PBS” channels is they ran for the first time the really popular shows during the “off season.” What I mean is that when Season 2 of “Downton Abbey” got done on Channel 11, it would soon be starting up on Channel 20. If you missed any episodes you could try to be home the next time it was on. Yes, now you can just donate to your favorite PBS station and get the complete show on DVD, but, that is not the point.
Many of these “lesser” stations served niche markets which now have little to no service. I never watched UniMas or Telemundo because I don’t speak Spanish, but, whacking 2 over the air Spanish speaking stations in a region which has a significant Spanish speaking population unable to afford cable is a rather cruel thing. It doesn’t take a great imagination to start believe the Trump administration is trying to purge the country of all Spanish speaking people regardless of their immigration status.
WPWR had an odd course through it’s history. It used to be Channel 50 back in the day before our great digital migration. I remember it having shows I liked during my younger years. Thought it was more of an “oldies” type station these days or at least it was until it got to be part of CW having shows I never cared about. It’s lesser station 50.2 Movies! would occasionally run really good old movies. I have watched a few on there recently.
So, let your writing mind wander. Was this really to open up bandwidth so cellular carriers could charge more for data or was that just the smokescreen and the real goal was to take away “free” television from non-English speaking people?
