A Cleveland TV station has ended the longest-running video slide apologizing for missing programming in TV history.
When “The Tube Music Network” shut down operations on October 1, 2007, Raycom Media’s WUAB/43 in the Cleveland market put up an electronic slide on digital subchannel 43.2 – telling viewers that the network had been pulled off the air, and asking them to refrain from calling either the station or their local cable operator.
That slide appeared on WUAB-DT/43.2 for over a year and four months, until finally coming down this week.
In its place is a new banner – with the legend “This Cleveland”.
“This”, as reported here earlier, is “This TV” – the MGM-backed programming service that is coming to WUAB and other Raycom stations soon in a nationwide deal between the “diginet” channel and the Alabama-based owner of WUAB and CBS affiliate WOIO/19.
No, we don’t know when the subchannel will light up with actual programming, but we’d put a bet on it happening fairly soon.
What will you see on “This TV”? The channel is mainly programmed with MGM-owned movies of some vintage, along with a couple of sitcoms (we recall seeing “Mr. Ed” on the schedule).
We haven’t broken out the “MGM Movie List”, but we suspect you’ll see the studio’s movies with rights that haven’t previously been sold to another broadcaster or cable/satellite outlet. Any “big name” MGM movies are probably in someone else’s library.
But it’s another “different” programming choice for area digital TV viewers.
We don’t know for sure, but we suspect that sometime after “This TV” lights up on 43.2, it’ll show up somewhere in the Time Warner Cable digital cable lineup…probably up there around where WOIO’s “WeatherNow” is in the 370s.
We seem to recall that TWC did indeed carry “The Tube”, but at some point decided it didn’t want to waste even digital cable bandwidth for a message that the service had ended…
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