Broadcaster claims that Star Trek, Rawhide and Wagon Train are "community affairs programming"
In fairness, Star Trek DID help America end racism once and for all by showing everyone how silly it was via a heavy-handed metaphor.
Is star trek not of importance to the community? Can anyone actually take this position?
Good god! Look at that guy whoâs white on the right side! Those guys are serious jerks and are likely to steal from you.
Star Trek isnât being made anymore. It canât respond to the needs of the community. It no longer can be more relevant than it already has been.
Kirk had a streamlined vetting process: âIf itâs black, white, or green, fuck it; if itâs a dude, kill it.â
Of course Star Trek is important to Community; where else would they have gotten the Imaginarium and Evil Abed?
To be fair, those 3 are all probably more educational and historically accurate (Trek is just future history) than most of the stuff on the History ChannelâŚ
According to Cat Lazarus, Gene Roddenberry always said Star Trek was Wagon Train to the stars.
The more important question is what TV station thinks that rerunning `Wagon Trainâ will get them more viewers than say, a guy writing out geometry problems.
Has ANYONE in the last 40 years watched âWagon Trainâ?
My house is just outside of Wilmington, Delaware.
Should I have known that this station exists?
Can anyone prove it actually does exist?
The swindle may be far deeper than anyone suspectsâŚ
If it wasnât for Star Trek, I wouldnât have been prepared for the Eugenics Wars. Thanks, Gene Roddenberry.
To be clear, what that station is airing is the Me-TV syndicated package, which is a zillion different old shows (H.R. PufnStuf, Land of the Lost, Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, Rifleman, Kojak, etc.) as well as some new content (Green Screen Adventures for kids). Â
(Saturday nights they do a scifi block, 7pm 2 Adam West Batmans, 8pm Wonder Woman, 9pm Olde Star Trek, 10pm, Svengoolie [a hosted horror movie show that probably was an influence on Mystery Science Theater 3000, out of Chicago] and midnight Lost In Space. Itâs for the most part a TV network like TVLand.
We get ME-TV here in Atlanta as well, itâs the secondary ABC digital channel (WSB-DT2).
Yeah, weâ've got MeTV in Portland. 2.2 as I recall.
The alternative is ThisTV, 32.3. It has a syndicated health program with Dr. Oz, which I suppose could be called a program in the public interest, if it was in the public interest to sell snake oil.
What amazes me about these stations is that the advertising is almost all low-rent national ads. Iâve never seen these replaced by higher-paying local ads. So you get an endless series of ads for cheap toys, lawyers looking for malpractice victims, extra-comfortable catheters, life insurance, and the like.
These ads pay very little. Which means these stations are running on an absolute shoe-string. With little exaggeration, they probably couldnât afford to show a crawl with the local weather.
What amazes me is when Canada did the digital switch-over, quite a few broadcast stations shut down because they claimed they couldnât afford it. So how does a station like that afford to run when the CBC canât afford to broadcast in my area?
The stations I describe are digital sub-stations.
A broadcast transport, which I suppose corresponds spectrum-wise to an old analog station, has* something like 38 mbps of video bandwidth. An HD station uses about 19.2 mbps of bandwidth, an SD station around 3.75 mbps.
So, a broadcaster with a transmiter and a transport can not only show an HD station, but one or more SD stations.
In Portland, the NBC station has 8.1 (NBC programming in HD), 8.2 (mostly news and weather) and 8.3 (Estrella, Spanish language programming).
OPB public broadcasting has 10.1 (HD PBS programming), 10.2 (repeats of PBS, plus artsy crafty programs, local author interviews. old movies) and 10.3 (pretty pictures plus OPB radio).
The ABC station shows MeTV on 2.2, the CW station has Antenna TV on 32.2 and ThisTV on 32.3. A religious programmer has SEVEN SD substations, 24.1 to 24.whatever, all with horrible non-stop televangelists and creepy low-budget childrensâ programming.
You can think of most of the substations to the broadcast equivalent of a cheap mostly-advertising magazine that your local newspaper occasionally folds into the daily edition. The newspaper gets a small fee; the magazine editor gets low-rent eyeballs.
*Assuming they are similar to cable QAM transports.
