Broadcaster claims that Star Trek, Rawhide and Wagon Train are "community affairs programming"

doctorow 2014-07-02 19:01:16 UTC #1

Brainspore 2014-07-02 19:10:00 UTC #2

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.

Humbabella 2014-07-02 19:16:31 UTC #3

Is star trek not of importance to the community? Can anyone actually take this position?

LurkingGrue 2014-07-02 19:41:12 UTC #4

Good god! Look at that guy who's white on the right side! Those guys are serious jerks and are likely to steal from you.

tachin1 2014-07-02 19:45:12 UTC #5

My knee jerk reaction to this.

jerwin 2014-07-02 19:49:41 UTC #6

Star Trek isn't being made anymore. It can't respond to the needs of the community. It no longer can be more relevant than it already has been.

Eksrae 2014-07-02 19:58:49 UTC #7

Kirk had a streamlined vetting process: "If it's black, white, or green, fuck it; if it's a dude, kill it."

Brainspore 2014-07-02 20:01:09 UTC #8

Joke's on you: that photo was taken in a mirror, SPACE BIGOT.

allium 2014-07-02 20:05:05 UTC #9

Of course Star Trek is important to Community; where else would they have gotten the Imaginarium and Evil Abed?

retepslluerb 2014-07-02 20:07:18 UTC #10

More importantly: My right side or their right side?

crenquis 2014-07-02 20:35:03 UTC #11

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 Channel....

digitalArtform 2014-07-02 21:11:04 UTC #12

According to Cat Lazarus, Gene Roddenberry always said Star Trek was Wagon Train to the stars.

SamWinston 2014-07-02 21:20:30 UTC #13

But they won't try to rip you off like those left side whites.

pikaia 2014-07-02 21:26:59 UTC #14

The more important question is what TV station thinks that rerunning `Wagon Train' will get them more viewers than say, a guy writing out geometry problems.

Has ANYONE in the last 40 years watched 'Wagon Train'?

Medievalist 2014-07-02 22:11:42 UTC #15

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 suspects...

jerwin 2014-07-02 22:22:02 UTC #16

If it wasn't for Star Trek, I wouldn't have been prepared for the Eugenics Wars. Thanks, Gene Roddenberry.

algomeysa2 2014-07-02 22:51:29 UTC #17

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).
(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. It's for the most part a TV network like TVLand.

We get ME-TV here in Atlanta as well, it's the secondary ABC digital channel (WSB-DT2).

stefanjones 2014-07-02 23:41:54 UTC #18

Yeah, we''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. I've 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 couldn't afford to show a crawl with the local weather.

Jardine 2014-07-02 23:54:07 UTC #19

What amazes me is when Canada did the digital switch-over, quite a few broadcast stations shut down because they claimed they couldn't afford it. So how does a station like that afford to run when the CBC can't afford to broadcast in my area?

stefanjones 2014-07-03 00:09:44 UTC #20

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 childrens' 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.