As if the fine denizens of the Tri-State area haven’t had enough to lament about between horrific rains and Aaron Judge’s lingering calf injury a goodly number of them–disproportionately represented in my social media feeds–awoke yesterday morning to what they equated to a death in the family. This AI-assisted UGV ironically both memorialized and celebrated what generations of New Yorkers knew in form or another as Channel 9:
To those who posted this admittedly well-crafted rewind that evoked plenty of images from childhood to maturity, I share some of your sentiments. I grew up watching A LOT of Channel 9, and thanks to its national distribution as a superstation I continued to watch a disproportionate amount of it even after I moved cross-country. They had the rights to most of the area’s professional sports teams–most notably the Mets–and over the years a ton of syndicated game shows that they relied on to sort of compete with their more well-heeled fellow independents at Channel 5 and 11, respectively. For most of my childhood years WOR-TV was decidedly not chasing my demo–though I do recall they checkerboarded the Marvel Superheroes in prime access that gave us the first-ever animated iterations of SPIDER-MAN, CAPTAIN AMERICA, THE INCREDIBLE HULK, THOR and SUB-MARINER–yes, roughly six decades later I can still rattle them off from memory. Once that failed to glean enough interest and market share from toy manufacturers’ spot budgets, they pivoted to lower-cost and significantly older-skewing fare and let their competitors spend the big bucks they raked in from all of that kids money on the more impactful off-network comedies entering syndication. For those not as obsessed with those genres as moi, they were also the reliable home of a handful of movies that at various points they ran multiple days a day or in a week under the MILLION DOLLAR MOVIE banner, using the orchestral version of Tara’s Theme from GONE WITH THE WIND as its own. Yes, when this child finally saw that movie classic on TV when NBC debuted it my first reaction was “Why are they using the song from Channel 9?”
It’s yet another signpost that time has inexorably marched on, to be sure. But to those who perceive it as tragic–you likely don’t know anyone who lives outside the Tri-State area, or you weren’t paying much attention to the news in the summer of 2009. Because the reality is that Channel 9–and for that matter every other channel you grew up watching–ceased to exist at that time. CORD CUTTER NEWS’ Luke Bouma authored a look back in June:
Seventeen years ago today, at midnight on June 12, 2009, the last analog television signals in the United States went dark forever. After decades of black-and-white rabbit ears, rooftop antennas, and the familiar hiss and snow of a weak signal, the nation’s full-power broadcast stations completed their mandatory switch to digital transmission — closing the curtain on an era that had defined home entertainment for more than half a century.
The push toward digital broadcasting in the United States began in earnest in the mid-1990s. The FCC formally adopted the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) digital television standard in 1996, and Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of the same year, which set the framework for the transition. Full-power stations were assigned paired digital channels and given a deadline — originally 2006 — to complete the switchover, after which they would surrender their analog spectrum.
For cable and satellite subscribers, there was little disruption. Channels continued to identify themselves by their call letters and most MVPDs continued to carry them in their existing positions. For true legacy stations, those were the numbers they were first assigned when they signed on in the 1940s and 1950s; newer stations that blossomed during the land rush of the launch of FOX and then both UPN and The WB that negotiated an upper tier adjacency that augmented their actual UHF channel continued to be known by such compromised identies as “TV 69/Cable 5”. But the hard truth was that TV 69 only existed in name only in the hopes that diary keepers would be somewhat less confused.
In the streaming era where millions receive over-the-air stations via tiles and menus on such VMVPDs as You Tube TV, Sling and Hulu Live Channels there are no channel numbers referenced at all. And stations with corporate ties to broadcast and cable networks have been co-mingled amongst them for several years now. Paramount Plus, for example, places both KCBS and KCAL feeds in a drop-down menu and references them identically on air as CBS Los Angeles–a practice that now exists across their entire owned-and-operated lineup where they have duopolies in just about every market.
As for FOX itself, again those broken-hearted Tri-Staters might take solace in the fact that they’re simply the latest victims of such “progress”. We already went through it here, as NCS’ Michael P. Hill wrote back in January 2023:
Los Angeles’ KCOP, which was once billed as a MyNetworkTV station, has rebranded under a variation of its Fox-affiliated sister station. KCOP is now known on air as “Fox 11 Plus,” a reference to the branding used by KTTV, which is the Fox-owned station in the market.
KCOP isn’t the first Fox-owned station to use this “plus” branding. It’s used in the Twin Cities market for WFTC, which brands as “Fox 9+” (using the plus sign rather than spelling out the word) after KMSP, and Washington, D.C.’s WDCA, which is known as “Fox 5 Plus” after WTTG.
And just about two years ago T Dog Media reported how folks in the Windy City were forced to adjust to the times:
On Monday, Fox-owned WPWR rebranded from “My50” to “Fox Chicago +”, an extension of sister station WFLD’s former branding. The move follows other Fox-owned My Network TV stations, which have de-emphasized the “My” branding over the last few years as the programming service faded into the background. Ironically, Fox did not go with “Fox 32 +” but the Fox Chicago branding, which WFLD used from 1997 to 2012.
And folks in the Bay Area have lived with the reality that what was once KICU Channel 36 San Jose has been known as KTVU or Fox 2 Plus, a de facto tentacle of the revered powerhouse with more than six decades of dominance in San Francisco and Oakland since April 2016.
Having digested local ratings books and now PDFs from these markets for decades I can attest that the demises of those other Fox Plus-nomenclatured signals were not treated as the kind of seminal event that took place yesterday with WWOR. WFTC, KICU and Dallas’ KDFI were afterthought outlets long before FOX even entered their worlds. These stations began to become effectively zombie channelswhen they lost local sports broadcasting rights and stopped producing separate newscasts. And anyone familiar with how media conglomerates have done much the same with cable networks especially in recent years.
And besides the whole branding B.S and cost-efficiency mumbo-jumbo there are indeed practical business reasons for this. It’s a tactic referred to as dual illumination where entire signals exist in two different channel positions–MVPDs have provided partners with this capacity for decades and aid in their discovery. Simulcasting is also regularly employed by major events by media conglomerates–this past Sunday night’s VMA awards aired on both CBS and its progenitor MTV; in past years they also aired on as many as nine other sister channels. The corporate sales force sold aggregated estimates and viewership was reported in similarly boosted manners. FOX Local now is looking to do same, and this fall they have expanded their efforts to do so. More newscasts will air concurrently on both their “mothership” and “plus” outlets and can therefore sell ads against higher numbers–with enhanced opportunities due to last month’s introduction of revised shorter thresholds that will allow credit for viewing between 30 seconds and five minutes for the first time since measurement was introduced. Nielsen rules also allow for accredited aggregation if a spot runs simultaneously–sure, folks haved”cumed” across multiple runs and outlets for years, but this practice actually makes it seamless and legitimate.
So gerrimandering like “Fox Plus” becomes even more of a necessity when one reads Bouma’s accounting of present-day trends that would appear to have left the door open going forward:
What few predicted in 2009 was that the digital transition would eventually help spark a renaissance for over-the-air television. As cable and satellite bills climbed steadily through the 2010s and streaming services proliferated in the 2020s, a growing number of Americans rediscovered the antenna. The economics were simple: a one-time antenna purchase of anywhere from twenty to a hundred dollars could deliver dozens of free, crystal-clear digital channels — local news, network programming, weather, classic movies, and more — with no monthly fee attached.
So not only is Channel 9 not technically ceasing to exist at this time–it’s merely being a new coat of paint to reflect something that happened a long time ago–there very well could be an opportunity to resurrect it INO as cord-cutters become a larger and demographically desirable part of the overall audience. Does that make you feel better, worry-warts? God, I hope so. Now you can go back to sump-pumping your basements.
Until next time…