One of my duties in my first paying TV job involved processing contest entries for the Goody's Home Run Jackpot. I worked for the KTVT television station at the time and Goody’s Headache Powder sponsored our Texas Rangers game broadcasts. If a Ranger homered during the designated inning of a game we were televising, a lucky entrant received the accumulated jackpot of cash. If Texas went homerless, the pot rolled over to the next telecast with more money added to it.
With sluggers like Juan González, Rubén Sierra, Julio Franco, and others on the team, the contest made for drama compelling enough to fill many mail buckets with postcards (analog entries only - KTVT’s first website was a few years away). These entries came from all over the country, too. In those days, a few local stations had placed their signals on satellites. Some cable companies across the country, as well as people with backyard dishes, would pick up the signal. Thus did baseball fans from all over watch the games - and entered to win. We didn’t enjoy the universal distribution of WGN (Cubs) or WTBS (Braves), but we were still a superstation.
That word sounds cool - “superstation.” One envisions titans of the industry wielding a giant antenna of power spewing forth content and ads across the land. The reality wasn’t quite as cool.
I asked a sales executive once about how useful it must have been to have all the extra viewers that Fort Worth-Dallas’s other stations didn’t have. He explained that it actually didn’t really help them. The people to whom they sold advertisements needed to buy the DFW market. The media buyers he serviced weren’t interested in those (more difficult to quantify) out-of-town eyeballs. They’d be judged on how well they reached Rangers fans (and other viewers) in North Texas.
Goody’s discontinued that contest a couple of years into my tenure at the station. I thought they were crazy at the time because of the tubs of postcards in my office on which a whole lot of people had written “Goody’s.” That was not enough information on which to judge their decision, of course. Maybe the price we tried to charge them to renew no longer passed even a mail-tub-intensive cost-benefit test. Or maybe they myopically undervalued the quality and quantity of the audience we were delivering. Who knows.
In any case, the superstation era soon ended. Major League Baseball better defined home team territories, wanted to protect national rightsholders, and, eventually, started thinking about streaming out-of-market games for a price. In addition, suppliers of syndicated programming wanted to get paid for the residents of the extra markets who might watch the shows we ran between the sports and the news.
Ah yes - news.
KTVT started a regular 9pm newscast in 1990. As an independent station, they had not previously been a player in covering news. But local news can be a substantial profit center for a TV station and we wanted to tap into those revenue streams. Another beautiful thing about news for a station is that it controls the rights to the programming, so it doesn’t matter who watches it or where. As technology has created more “wheres,” it’s also given rise to a new version of the superstation era - one with more revenue possibilities. Consider these developments:
• When I started in the industry, your options to watch moving pictures were pretty much TV, at a movie theater, or your home VHS player. We still have those (if you can get your VCR to work, that is) but have added myriad streaming options and devices.
• Video has stolen market share from print in a number of ways. On the local side, as reported by Pew Research, newspaper ad revenue fell more than 60% from 2008 to 2018. With a robust video base from which to work, ad revenue has held relatively strong in local stations (when you include their emerging digital inventory) over the last two decades, according to Pew.
• With quality syndicated programming less lucrative and more difficult to come by, and opportunity presenting itself thanks to newspapers’ decline, stations have expanded their news products. The National Association of Broadcasters studied Nielsen data to conclude: “More than 107,000 hours of local television news content aired in November 2021 across the country, an increase of over 40% from November 2011 and more than 16% from November 2016.”
Did you ever watch WGN’s news program on their superstation? I might have if it came on after a Cubs game. If you were a Chi-town expatriate, you might have been plenty interested. Perhaps there were former Texans who liked it when they could see our Nine O’Clock News after the ballgame via satellite. It turns out that present-day TV station owners think there’s an appetite for such programming. If you’ve got a streaming device (and you all do), it turns out you can watch a large portion of the above-referenced glut of local news, should you find yourself with 107,000 hours of free time this month. Watch newscasts on the stations’ websites, catch clips on social media, or watch aggregated content from local markets on streaming platforms like Roku. A good example of the latter is the CBS News Texas channel on Pluto TV. It includes newscasts from KTVT (which became a CBS affiliate in 1995 - we added a lot more news programming that year and they have even more now).
One reason it makes a lot more sense for a station group to have locally-originated programming available outside its markets has to do with how buyers can now purchase advertising programmatically. We used to sell ads in a particular program that Nielsen guessed had a lot of the types of people the advertiser wanted. Now that targeting is a lot more precise and you can buy the eyeballs of people who, for instance, your research has shown will be willing to use a powder product to treat their next headaches. Buyers can be less beholden to local markets, although they can certainly specify geographic filtering. But a more expansive ad world means more opportunity for sales to a broader base of potential clients.
As regional sports networks decline, local stations have started becoming a player for sports rights again, too. They’ll likely be limited in how they can utilize those telecasts beyond their home markets, but it’ll be interesting to see how some of these deals shake out in terms of streaming rights. The superstation just might be making a comeback. Entry-level TV workers might still have a lot of (digital) contest entries to process.
Rush Olson has spent two-plus decades directing creative efforts for sports teams, broadcasters, and related entities. He currently conceives and executes content projects through his companies, Rush Olson Creative & Sports, FourNine Productions and Mint Farm Films. Through MFF, he’s at work on biographical documentaries about Nancy Lieberman, Sidney Moncrief, Pudge Rodríguez, Ed Belfour, and Bob Lilly as well as a show about the The College Gridiron Showcase.
Subscribe to @MintFarmFilms on YouTube to see excerpts from upcoming documentaries.
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