Sunday, January 2, 2000

Viewers lose most in KIII's decision to stand up to AT&T

So this is how the No. 1 station treats its viewers? KIII, more concerned with corporate one-upmanship than with the viewing habits of the audience that made it the most-watched station in Corpus Christi, has chosen to drop off AT&T Cable Services rather than continue negotiating a new retransmission consent agreement.
   Just after midnight Friday, AT&T was forced by federal law to black out KIII and remove it from cable channel 5 because KIII had not reached a new agreement with the Denver-based cable company.
   AT&T can't replace KIII with an out-of-town ABC feed because Federal Communications Commission regulations prevent the importing of a network's signal into a market that already has a station affiliate of that network.
   Every other broadcaster in town gave AT&T a consent agreement weeks ago. KIII owner Mike McKinnon was the sole holdout, asking for a second channel position and for a heavily subsidized promotional push elsewhere on AT&T's channel lineup.
   AT&T offered KIII an extension of its old contract that would have kept the station on cable as talks continued. But according to AT&T executives, KIII gave them a flat "No" and stopped negotiating entirely Friday afternoon.
   Bad news for cable-watching sports fans, who missed out on various college football bowl games Saturday. Today, they will miss the Fiesta Bowl, then the final Monday Night Football game of the season and the Sugar Bowl national championship Tuesday night.
   Bad news for viewers who enjoy the hit ABC game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," which returns Jan. 9, and "NYPD Blue," returning Jan. 11.
   Super bad news for Super Bowl watchers who'll have to visit non-AT&T-wired friends or a satellite-equipped sports bar to catch the game Jan. 30.
   AT&T has approximately 85,000 subscriber households in this area. It's safe to say all of them watch something on ABC during the week - "Good Morning America," "Live with Regis and Kathie Lee," one of the daytime soaps, "The Rosie O'Donnell Show," "Wheel of Fortune," "20/20," a "Seinfeld" rerun or one of KIII's top-rated editions of "Eyewitness News."
   To see those programs now, those 85,000 TV homes will have to use an outside antenna and switch off their cable with one of those A/B things. And then switch it back again to see CNN or MTV or A&E.
   Not good.
   How did it come to this? Blame McKinnon's bad case of channel envy. "We just want what KRIS already has," he said, referring to the NBC station's partnership with Fox station KDF and Telemundo station KAJA, which all have channel spots on AT&T.
   Those three stations cross-promote like crazy all over cable. That's good business.
   It would help KIII to have sister stations on AT&T. But it doesn't. And KRIS didn't either until a few years ago when it acquired KDF and KAJA, which already had homes on cable. KRIS didn't go to war with the cable company (then called TCI-Cablevision) to get KDF and KAJA on.
   McKinnon's stepson Don Gillis, who's employed as programming director at KIII, recently picked up a Pax-TV affiliation and also the affiliate of United Paramount Network, which was formerly held by KTMV, the Tejano video channel.
   According to AT&T execs, McKinnon wanted AT&T to remove The Discovery Channel (channel 8) to make way for whatever he wanted to put there.
   "He never told us what he'd put on that channel," said AT&T's regional communications director Scott Sobel. "He only said he'd program 'something good' there."
   Neither Pax nor UPN yet qualify as "something good."
   Pax, which bills itself as a family-friendly channel, airs mostly reruns of old sitcoms and westerns. It was the only network that canceled its entire millennium extravaganza Friday because of lack of advertiser support.
   UPN is a still-struggling network that programs only four nights a week of original programming. Its only major hit to date is "WWF Smackdown!," a wrestling show on Thursday night.
   Replace Discovery with Stone Cold Steve Austin? You've got to be kidding.
   KIII is fond of thanking local viewers in self-congratulatory TV ads for making them No. 1 in the ratings.
   They may be No. 1. But the way they're treating their cable viewers sure smells like No. 2.
  
  
  

 
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