Overseas TV History

Still on US local TV retrospective specials, but now into this year, we get Chicago’s WGN-TV, which aired a special two-hour retrospective in prime time, hosted by the station’s main news anchors and featuring lots of archival material and context. The high-quality level of production shows how Nexstar is still showing some love to the former flagship of the Tribune Media Company, which Nexstar took over in 2019. Not even many of the stations celebrating 75 years between 2021 and this year have achieved such a great watch.

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And here are bits and pieces of La Chaîne Météo, France’s 24-hour cable/satellite weather channel, from 2002:

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A montage of South Florida’s WSVN news openers and promos up until 2020:

And here’s a montage of their sister station in Boston, WHDH:

Fun fact: these graphics have been mostly done in-house (sic). They also have its own in-house music composer, Chris Crane, who has done the station’s themes in his distinctive “Miami Vice-style” since 1991.

WSVN and WHDH are well-known globally for its tabloid “if it bleeds, it leads” news format. This particular format was made out of necessity rather than a decision of “change the rules”: although NBC was having a particular boom in the ratings thanks to Brandon Tartikoff, being regarded as “the gold standard for sophisticated programming . . . the No. 1 network for affluent and well-educated young viewers” during the period, outside of network programming, WSVN was suffering in the rating fights, being third in the local news audience figures; thus, NBC, in an aggressive move, bought rival WTVJ from investment firm KKR. WSVN owner Ed Ansin, fearing NBC would terminate early their affiliation (which was set to expire in 1989), unsuccessfully petitioned the FCC to stop the acquisition; eventually, a compromise was made, where NBC would allow Ansin to air their network shows for one more year, including live coverage of the MLB World Series, the Miami Dolphins NFL games and, the crown jewel, the Seoul 1988 Olympics. Eventually, WTVJ, now under control of NBC, but still a CBS affiliate for all intents and purposes, began housing programming which WSVN preempted.

Behind the scenes, Sunbeam Television began behind-the-scenes talks with CBS, which almost immediately denied them an affiliation deal; the Tiffany Network was already in talks with Taft Broadcasting to buy Homestead affiliate WCIX (now WFOR). Thus, Ed Ansin was forced with sign with the then-nascent Fox network, which only aired network shows on weekends; as a result, WSVN began to be programmed as an indie station: they aired a movie in prime time at 8:00 p.m. every weeknight during the late part of the 80s, but, instead of buying large amounts of syndicated first-run shows, off-network sitcoms and cartoons, they decided to greatly expand their news operations.

Under the direction of Joel Cheatwood, WSVN dropped the lighter and softer newscast format in favor of the “Miami Vice-style” newscasts, with a very flashy, OTT, and “smack-in-your-face” look and feel. Cheatwood and Ansin moved the newscasts out of the traditional studio and into the newsroom and control room. After a few years of a slow implementation, the format brought up the intensity by 1991: the presentation became very aggressive, bold graphics filled the screen, discordant music opened the newscast and penetrated the proceedings, and even the station announcer, Scott Chapin, was menacing!

In summary: the tone of the newscasts was also wildly different from anything the market - perhaps the nation - had yet seen. This was not Peter Jennings soberly reporting on the latest going-ons in the Soviet Union. That wasn’t the point. The point wasn’t to just inform, but entertain as well - thus the flashy graphics, catchy headlines and fast-paced delivery in a rapid-fire, excited manner, not sparing any of the gory details when it came to describing murders or rapes.

By 1994, WSVN made another move: they moved the newsroom and studio into a much bigger two-floor space which they called it the Newsplex, embracing the then-new Internet media and allowing them to get network-level production values which is very rarely done anymore.

Many of its competitors saw that station lasting more than maybe two years with that “The News Station” format. Certainly nobody saw the station not only surviving the switch, but thriving: WSVN quickly rose to the top spot among English language stations in that market, and it was boosted by Fox getting the NFL rights in 1994; many of the new affiliates took WSVN’s model for expanding their news services, and Fox used the template to launch its Fox News Channel in 1996.

The competitors noticed and took some time to clone WSVN. When they finally switch to NBC, WTVJ had a handsome art deco look from Jon Fox’s Hothaus Creative. By 1992, that was replaced by cold banks of monitors, a theme music straight out of Miami Vice, and a campaign called “Watch Our Team Work”. Cross-street, WPLG did copy the “if it bleeds, it leads” concept, although not as grandiose as WSVN, with more muted graphics and a more traditional studio, and they are now competing for first place with 7.

For a time, WCIX was a hold-out, and took the bold decision to relaunch its early evening shows into a “family sensitive” format with no violent footage, as well as reduce the prevalence of crime news in all of its newscasts; this didn’t last long, and with WCIX swapping frequencies with WTVJ to become WFOR, they got a WSVN clone by 1998, with a new look with more tropical colors and a new version of Gari Media’s News Source with a salsa beat; the changes revived the laggard station, but it has now taken a more middle-fiddle format which has profited from CBS’s status as most watched network; its 11pm news is more competitive with 7 and 10, and has successfully fended off the ratings dominance of the Spanish-speaking local channels.

In the US, they also took notice: the aggressive pacing and styling slowly took over other TV stations during the 90s, reviving the ratings of some laggards and placing them in par with its more traditional rivals which were (in most cases) the top-watched channels. Even the network newscasts were quick to add tabloid stories and flashier graphics.

But Ansin took note of the situation at WHDH, then owned by a consortium of local retail mogul David Mugar and Patriots owner Robert Kraft, to try to bring his ideas to Boston. After failing to imitate WCVB and quickly losing money, Ansin was quick to react and bought the station in July 1993; he quickly installed Cheatwood and bought the “Miami Vice” format to New England, although WHDH’s new format was more toned down than that of Miami, it shocked the Boston TV statement and led to the high profile resignation of many veteran station personalities. Soon, WHDH had its ratings revived and it is now competing with WCVB in the race for first place.

Soon, with increased rejection by social groups of the “if it bleeds, it leads” format, WSVN had its world famous format toned down, with less coverage of crime (which is still the bread and butter of WSVN news) and increased time for consumer, lifestyle, health and well-being segments and more coverage of entertainment, sports and weather, specially during big events happening in South Florida. For a flashy, very Latin city like Miami, they do a great job covering their city and when a major breaking story happens they are brilliant.

WSVN is consistently also regarded by media insider publications as a “station for straight and solid journalists”, mainly for being considered as a “news factory”: the station bosses are a good group to work for and expect hard work and a tenacious attitude toward getting the story. Some criticism is regarded on the overall work environment, often told as “cold” and for its low pay wages.

PD: sorry for the really long post!

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With Southern Cross discontinuing its news in the Spencer Gulf region, here’s a look at how another TV station–KSTW in Seattle/Tacoma–bid farewell to its viewers in 1998, when its news department was shut down. You can skip to the 10:05 mark for a look back at the history of the station’s news department; that report is followed by a behind the scenes tour of the newsroom:

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And here’s the last-ever edition of am2day from SABC2 in South Africa. The program was canceled in 1999 when SABC discontinued the contract with the company that produced it:

WSVN’s Newsplex set design even made it to Germany, where it was used by ProSieben:

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At roughly that time, Germany’s Sat.1 also used a well-known American set, or at least a lookalike version thereof. Here’s the NBC Nightly News from that era:

And here’s Sat.1:

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This set debuted on January 15, 1996, according to this promo. This coincided with a timeslot change to 19:30, taking on arch-rival RTL Aktuell. Newly appointed news director Wolfgang Klein didn’t immediately take the chief anchor chair, with Jan Fromm and Jeannette Riesch still alternating in the hot seat for a time:


The theme music was composed by Santa Monica-based Groove Addicts (now known as Grooveworx), which has worked mostly for radio stations (including BBC Radio 2, B5 aktuell/BR24 and Hitradio Ö3 in Austria). The theme was also made available for syndication under the name “Global News”. Further updates were made in 1999, when Sat.1 left Mainz for downtown Berlin and a new look was installed:

At the time, Sat.1 aired a 75-minute news block: at 17:30, 10 of the 16 German states aired a regional oriented newscast (with Hamburg/Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony/Bremen receiving dual editions with separate opt-outs) which were mostly outsourced to third parties (mainly regional radio stations, newspapers and/or production houses); the exceptions being Saarland and the new states which were reformed from the former East German states, these received a satellite edition which repurposed stories from these broadcasts and the main news shows into a single edition. This was followed by lifestyle-oriented tabloid newsmagazine Blitz and the main 18:30 news report.

Here’s an example edition for Berlin-Brandenburg, produced by radio station Hundert,6 (the first commercial station in Berlin, launched in 1987 and bankrupt in 2005).

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From 1976, RAI’s coverage of the Friuli earthquake, which devastated a large part of northeastern Italy (as well as areas in western Slovenia) and left almost a thousand people dead:

A 1982 news promo reel from Telesound, a company that produced promos and news themes for many local stations across the U.S., as well as NBC News:

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And here’s a showcase of some of their news packages, including many Scanimate opens:

And now, the demo reel of a competing company, Tuesday Productions:


Still with demo reels of 70s/80s TV graphics and music, here are some reels from now defunct group Dolphin Productions, a New York-based design and post production company which was one of the most prolific users of Scanimate-based graphics.

Now to the 90s, here are some demo reels of works made by Hollywood-based GRFX/Novocom (also now defunct), one of the first companies to embrace glitzy and high-quality computer graphics as part of their design process:

And here’s one from English & Pockett, which became the first arch-rival to Lambie-Nairn + Company, after landing a contract tendered by ITV to design their first corporate brand back in 1989; from then, the company landed multiple contracts worldwide, including with Discovery Europe, Deutsche Welle, SVT, TV4 Sweden, Viasat, TVR (Romania), TrueVisions (Thailand) and Pacific Bell (USA). It also made the branding for many ITV franchises (including HTV, LWT and Yorkshire) and designed the 1998 corporate brand (which they continued to develop up until 2002).

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And of course, you can’t talk about US TV graphics without mentioning JCBD (John Christopher Burns) since the late 80s.

Starting out as a motion graphics designer in WTBS Atalnta, his designs involved multiple layers of animation, heavy dozes of Quantel Paintbox, and purplish gradient shades in the 3D models. Most famously, he worked on the graphics for CNN’s now bare-boned sister channel Headline News, which was used from 1989 to 1992.

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Worth noting John Christopher Burns was one of the initial partners on Television by Design (TVbd), alongside Jay Antzakas, Melanie Goux, and Jay Cordova. All of them also started out with Turner, whilst continuing working on titles and other graphics mostly for CNN (by then, Turner was already outsourcing the graphics provision for its other cable networks, including TNT, to other companies) while also doing work for other companies through TVbd. Although JCBD would part ways with his fellow TVbd partners by the mid-90s, they would still have a close relationship over time.

Alongside JCBD, TVbd designs shared many of these hallmarks (multiple layers, Quantel Paintbox and lots of gradients), but its designs would become more sophisticated over time, thanks to computer graphics magic. They would have a large number of clients, ranging from standalone stations (WBRZ, WISN, KRON, WTGI, WEWS, WTVT, ZDTV) to corporate conglomerates (Gannett, Malrite, Post-Newsweek, Scripps, McGraw-Hill, Pappas, Rogers Media).

Returning to classic CNN, here’s a look at some visual pieces from that era:

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So that 18.30 bulletin was only a 15-minute block like the Tagesschau then? Curious. It’s interesting it all seemed to end up with barely any trampling of toes on the (national) news schedule back then: Sat.1 at 6.30, RTL Aktuell eventually setlling in to 6.45, just before Heute on ZDF, then Pro7’s bulletin mostly filling in the space between then and the Tagesschau. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

(Of course, that only works because the news tends to be to-the-point-ish, often fifteen or twenty minutes, and the opinion and analysis sits in another show, whether it be national analysis or regional news magazines…)

Looks like Sat.1 now plonk their evening news in to start 5 minutes before Tagesschau (and thus just before the 20.15 prime time that the latter pretty much dictates) which would’ve never happened in the 90s (if only because the ratings would be probably miniscule) - with the mothership moving Newstime on ProSieben to 6pm.

Seems like most of these states still do have their 17.30 show - although the Berlin-Brandenburg area doesn’t (probably disbanded when, as you said, its producer went bust); these opt out in the middle of what’s now a three-hour national lifestyle show thingo.

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Speaking of which… On December 4, 1995, Sat.1 experimented with advancing the start of prime time to exactly at 8pm, in an attempt to take on Tagesschau’s ratings dominance and allow for evening programming to start exactly on the dot. This move was heavily promoted under the name “Volle Stunde, Volles Programm”, and was aggressively marketed during that Christmas season. The big idea of then-controller Fred Kogel, he also successfully lured Fritz Egner, Thomas Gottschalk und Harald Schmidt (all of who had worked on ARD and ZDF) to bring high credit to the new evening strategy. Kogel also bought the Noel’s House Party format from the BBC and gave Gottschalk presentation duties for it, whilst placing Harald Schmidt to lead an American-style late night show.

However, with German audiences already accustomed to 20:15 as the start of prime time, Sat.1’s ratings fell strongly, at a degree that also affected their access prime time shows. This led to Kogel to dramatically alter the channel’s scheme, cancelling many of the channel’s long-tenured successes (including a version of Wheel of Fortune) and replacing it with cheaper, tabloid, younger-oriented non-fiction shows. This would become one of the factors that led to the decline and bankruptcy of Leo Kirch’s media empire (including the failed DF1 satellite TV project, his aggressive pursuing of local and regional sports rights, and the agreement with FIFA to serve as media distributor of the 2002 and 2006 World Cup, in an attempt to bring more revenue from subscription TV partners, initially in Europe and later globally after acquiring the assets of failed Swiss company ISMM/ISL).

Egner and Gottschalk stood for some years with the channel, and Harald Schmidt would become the channel’s savior in audience figures, at a degree his late night show regularly doubled its daily average and became a cultural phenomenon in Germany thanks to his dark and intellectual humor (he would resign at the end of 2003 after clashing over creative differences with Swiss media executive Roger Schawinski, who had been installed as Sat.1 controller and brought his news-based programming concept from TeleZüri into the channel), but many of the channel’s star presenters, like Reinhold Beckmann, Johannes B. Kerner and Erich Böhme, were laid off, and the experiment was dropped on January 3, 1997, after just one year.

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This is how local news inserts used to work in New Mexico before most were abolished in around 2008, when the economy hit a rough patch. The clip begins with the news from KOB in Albuquerque, the state’s largest city, but at the 18:42 mark, KOBR in Roswell opts out (as the British would say) for its own news and weather segment focusing on southeastern New Mexico. About five minutes later, it’s back to KOB and the statewide sports:

These days, most of these non-Albuquerque stations in New Mexico merely serve as relay stations with news bureaus feeding the statewide news; they no longer air local news inserts.

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Still with OTA local news inserts, here’s Grand Forks-based WDAZ, a semi-satellite of Fargo’s WDAY. Although both stations aired an almost identical lineup, WDAZ aired its own local newscasts every evening in place of those of WDAY.

Newscasts began to be cut in 2011, with the weekend and 5pm broadcasts being replaced by a straight WDAY simulcast. The remaining newscast were dropped altogether in 2018.

Over in Wilmington, North Carolina, low-powered WILM 10 has never aired a local newscast due to the station lacking an appropriately-sized facility for building such an operation. Instead, and thanks to its ownership by the Raleigh-based Capitol Broadcasting Company, it simulcasts WRAL’s news output on weekday mornings at 6am and nightly at 6pm, but airs local weather breakaways instead of the Raleigh-specific forecasts; nevertheless, these are produced and pre-recorded by and from WRAL.


Now to other kind of local news inserts… from cable TV.

An example from TSM News (Tri-State Media), a short lived regional news channel targeting suburban and regional areas of the Philadelphia TV market. The channel was owned by local cable operator Lenfest Communications, which operated as Suburban Cable and Garden State Cable. The channel was formed from the merger of 5 county-wide channels and centralization of most operations in the company’s headquarters in Newcastle, Delaware.

The channel offered live newscasts from 9am to 8pm daily, with the first half-hour being a local news bulletin, and the second dedicated to short talk segments which embraced viewer participation with the then-nascent Internet and through phone talkback; this element was also heavily taken by the channel’s other segments and content. It also offered two daily cut-ins at 6pm and 7pm with county-wide reports of news, sports and weather for each of the five zones Lenfest covered; these suburban bureaus were supplemented with political bureaus in Baltimore, Trenton and Union. From 1:12:10 and 1:23:56, you can see an example of a local news opt-out targeting Delaware and Chester County.

The channel closed in 2000 after rival Comcast bought Lenfest, merging the news service with its existing local-exclusive channel CN8.

Now to a more recent example, that of Charter-owned Spectrum News 1 Southern California. During its first year after launch back in 2018, Charter divided the channel into a, fully neighborhood-based 4-zone feed structure, in which each part of Los Angeles had a different selection of content which reflected each respective region (and which had a story selection less reliant on the mix of police chases, crime stories and entertainment reports which often populates LA TV news) and a mix of live and pre-recorded studio presentation; from :15 and :45 past the hour, all feeds had its own fully breakaway segment. Due to budget considerations, the 4-zone structure was dropped by the start of 2019. Here’s an example of the LA South feed, which also stretched into San Diego:

And here’s another from the LA West feed, which targeted the main part of the SoCal area:


And now, to a national scale, CNN Headline News had an opt-out slot at :25 and :55 past the hour, preempting the final lifestyle and entertainment-oriented block at the discretion of the cable service. During the 90s and early 2000s, these short reports were produced by local OTA TV stations; when Headline News was on the middle of its Headline Prime/News and Views era, a few cable operators had still a (now much shorter) local opt-out; by then, the operators themselves were in charge of the slots, now fully pre-recorded and focusing on public affairs interviews.

One of the most notable Local Editions in recent years came from the Northern Michigan region: working with Charter Traverse City, Eric Wotila produced a more straightforward newscast during these short breakaway periods. This effort would lead to the launch of MiNews 26, and then the small news network NewsNet.

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Don’t feel you need to apologise - I (and I’m sure others too) find your posts really interesting to read because of the depth you go into. I’ve learned loads about overseas TV that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

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Did you know MTV2 (the original name of now-defunct MTV Rocks) was not only broadcasting all over the UK, but also broadcasting all over Europe?

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Indeed it did, for a time it broadcast in most of Europe France, Spain and the Nordics, before resorting to focus on UK audiences by the 2010s, as Italian and Central European feeds arrived.


Here’s a quite long context on the rise and fall of Azul Televisión, which was the name Buenos Aires’ Canal 9 used between 1999 and mid-2002.

It all began in 1997, Canal 9 Libertad, the name the channel used during the administration of Alejandro Romay (who made the channel a stronghold in the ratings during most of the 80s, with lots of populist light entertainment programming, a high amount of imports and the infamous Nuevediario program), was faltering in the ratings. Although for most of the 90s, Canal 9 was a strong second and offered stiff competition to Telefe, by the mid-90s, a resurgent Canal 13 (with its mix of high-quality programming and strong emphasis on local originals) and América TV (which was starting to catch in the audiences with its counterprogramming efforts and an emphasis on tabloid talk shows and strong news programming) quickly led Canal 9 to bounce back into a distant fourth.

Romay, desperate to find some relief, took the decision to sell half of the channel’s stake. He had talks with companies like News Corp, Venevisión and Rai International, but many of these turned down the offerings almost immediately. He eventually settled in with the Prime Media Group (yep), but with a condition: Prime wanted to buy all of Romay’s stake on Telearte. He eventually surrendered and Prime bought Canal 9 and Telearte (including a pack of radio stations and regional O&Os which were later resold) for A$224 million. After a time of uncertainty, Prime decided not to implement the original plans for the network, which involved bringing a pack of commercial network programming to the station. And soon, cracks began to appear.

Some weeks after buying Canal 9, Prime was forced to sell half to it to Carlos Ávila, throughout his sporting media rights holding Torneos y Competencias. However, Ávila was a stakeholder in a massive conglomerate holding long favored by then-President Carlos Menem, Citicorp (not related to the American finance group), which, ironically, also owned a big stake in Telefe (through publishing and print house Atlántida). Still, with this situation, Canal 9 had an anemic 1998, only surviving with some original left-overs from the Romay era, including legendary talk show host Mirtha Legrand.


Behind the scenes, Prime executives began working on relaunching the channel from scratch. After toying in 100 names (of which Nueve Televisión was the front-runner for a long time), it was decided that the channel would be renamed Azul Televisión. The rationale for such a name was the use of blue as part of Argentina’s flag (it is rather light blue), as well as symbolizing “transparency and a fresh new start”. The new logo and brand identity, which was quite revolutionary for them, as it had a quite Australian style presentation, but still being within the Argentinian TV style, was designed by local studio Medialuna (now known as Tónika).

A big pre-launch campaign was commissioned, including radio and print publicity. After some short promos airing from September on Canal 9’s commercial breaks, shortly before Christmas, this promo, directed by Pablo Sofovich (son of popular TV figure Gerardo Sofovich), revealed the new look to viewers and media industrials in a star-studded event. It also wanted to make a clean start in content, moving Telefe controller Pablo Galli crosstown, firing Mirtha Legrand (who promptly went to América TV) and a series of low-cost entertainment programming, which mostly received mixed-to-negative reviews and were quickly dropped. The channel relaunched on January 4, 1999, but it failed to revive Canal 9’s ratings: it would have a series of successes, like soap opera Los Buscas de Siempre (the launch pad for actors Pablo Echarri and Nancy Dupláa) and a series of absurdist sketch comedy shows (including Todo por Dos Pesos, which moved to Canal 7 next year), but it would still mostly stick in fourth place until Daniel Hadad bought the channel in 2002.


And here’s a look at the channel’s initial presentation, which was quite sophisticated for Argentinian TV at the time.

After some months, the sophisticated presentation was dropped in favor of a simpler style, not unlike what its rival did at the time. This montage also includes a look at some of the channel’s idents, very sophisticated too for the time.


Another of the channel’s moves to improve audience figures was to drop the Nuevediario tabloid newscast for… Azul Noticias. They initially tried to produce a newscast in the style of Aussie news bulletins three times a day on weekdays with station veterans Cristina Pérez (now with Telefe), Claudio Rígoli and Lana Montalbán.

Due to low ratings from the outset, Prime took the decision to drop the newscasts and work out in a new format to relaunch the evening broadcast; the midday broadcast was retained for a while and then dropped altogether, and news director Eduardo Cura was sacked. To replace Rígoli, who remained a reporter and newsflash presenter, local TV legend Juan Carlos Pérez Loiseau was hired (in a highly publicized move) to present the new show alongside Pérez, now standing down most of the time. The studio was heavily rebuilt, with a soft set being added and new lighting being implemented, and the graphics and music were tweaked.

Newly appointed news director Ricardo Cámara dropped the Aussie-style format and the presence of political stories in favor of a Inside Edition-style newsmagazine, mixing coverage of local news and some international stories with lots of lighter (and sometimes too irrelevant) feature reporting, vox pops, celebrity interviews, happy talk, and… an astrologer! The format, although heavily promoted by local press as “an alternative”, was so poorly received by viewers and the papers itself, that in the next day, it had increased the number of hard news stories and dropped some of the gimmicky features.

The moves didn’t save Azul in the figures: by 2001, the wave logo was out and a new pyramid logo from Ratto BBDO was installed, with Blue Man Group-esque idents also being implemented.

The final months of Azul meant another new look, but also a time for what it indeed became its most prized success: young adult drama Rebelde Way, which spawned a musical and entertainment franchise and many global remakes, as well as launching the career of many Argentinian celebrities of the 2000s and today.

Although it finally reached the third place in the ratings ladder thanks to it, this didn’t save the channel altogether, as ownership continued to change. By 1999, Torneos y Competencias had trespassed its half stake on Azul TV to Telefónica (which also bought Telefe from Atlántida/Citicorp), and two years later, in the midst of the Argentinian political and economical crisis, Prime sold its stake to JPMorganChase; they would resell it months later to Telefónica. This forced the Spanish telco (whose media assets were organized into a subsidiary, Admira Media) to resell Azul TV as local laws forbid common ownership between the top broadcast networks. Then Hadad came.

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An historical compilation of news opens from a virtual TV duopoly in the DMA serving Fort Myers, Cape Coral and Naples, Florida; WBBH-TV (NBC) and WZVN-TV (ABC).

Both WBBH and WZVN are operated by Waterman Broadcasting; the Waterman family of San Antonio, Texas owns WBBH outright, and it operates WZVN through a local marketing agreement with Montclair Communications, a company owned by relatives of the family. Bernard Waterman, family patriarch, bought WBBH from a consortium of local investors operating as Broadcasting-Telecasting Services, owned by Joseph Buerry Jr., Jackson Burgess and Howard Hoffman (former employees of local radio station WMYR, hence the WBBH call letters) due to financial difficulties. WBBH took over WZVN’s operations after Bert Ellis took the decision to outsource operations in 1994, due to the station’s poor reputation and struggling operations. After Ellis sold his station group to Raycom Media (now part of Gray Television), FCC regulations at the time forced him to resell the station to Montclair.

Local operation of both stations will soon come to an end. After Edith Waterman (Bernard’s widow) had a desire to sell the station before her 100th birthday, and further supplemented by the excessive outpouring of money related to Hurricane Ian, the Watermans are selling WBBH and WZVN’s operations to Hearst Television. It should be a good fit, given the operation is mostly straightforward hard news, and Hearst stations tend also to do the same. The current graphics are also set to be replaced by Hearst’s standardized graphics and music (Strive) packages.

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Now, something from my home nation (Mexico). Here’s an history of idents and promo campaigns used by XEW-TV, which has branded for many years as El Canal de Las Estrellas, but now it is simply known as Las Estrellas. It is considered the flagship Mexican TV network, and is the main of the four networks operated by Televisa (now part of TelevisaUnivision) in the country:

To add some context: Las Estrellas wasn’t the first TV channel in the country (it is mistakenly considered as such, but the distinction goes to XHTV 4, long a Mexico City-targeted station), but was the first to reach national coverage and high ratings; it is still the most-watched network in Mexico, but has now to contend with two competing national networks (TV Azteca and Imagen, as well as quasi-national/regional networks Multimedios Canal 6 and Telsusa Canal 13 in some degree) and a big universe of cable networks and streaming services (Mexico has one of the highest cable/satellite and streaming penetrations globally).

The network went on-air on March 21, 1951, as the TV offspring of radio superstation XEW-AM, owned by music and appliance distribution mogul Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta, who was also the owner of the newly launched channel. XEW-TV’s first transmission was a live, play-by-play, outside broadcast of a Mexican League match, with XEW radio veteran Pedro Septién on commentary duties.

Other than live sports broadcasts, XEW-TV initially broadcast films from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, as its studios in Chapultepec 18 were still under construction. The studio complex, known as Televicentro, would be inaugurated in January 1952. Soon thereafter, the programming scope would be expanded to include live variety shows and television theatre showcases, in a style similar to XEW radio’s similarly formatted shows.

XEW-TV would be a pioneer in Mexican television, and would establish many industry firsts. In 1962, the channel would become the flagship network of the newly merged Telesistema Mexicano, which also brought XHTV and XHGC under Azcárraga’s hands, and, after merging with XHTM-TV and Televisión Independiente de México, many of these station’s programs would move to XEW-TV.

As a result of these moves, XEW-TV rapidly grew and became the country’s most watched TV network, a position which was undisputed for many years, as Televisa held a monopoly on commercial TV in Mexico, which even went into heavily influencing the political landscape in the country (a government-backed network, Imevisión, which operated both commercial and non-commercial stations, was not a factor in the ratings).

As a result, by 1985, and in preparation for the 1986 FIFA World Cup (in which Televisa was the host broadcaster), XEW-TV was renamed El Canal de las Estrellas, in reference to the station’s line-up of actors, comedians and presenters (Mexico has a very strong star system in regards of personalities, with many prized actors appearing exclusively for Televisa’s globally distributed telenovelas). This was further reinforced with the launch of an image campaign song, sung by Lucía Méndez, in 1988, which became as increasingly known as the network’s name (many examples are shown in the video).

After the death of Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, the founder’s son and longtime President of Televisa, in 1997, El Canal de las Estrellas suffered a massive restructuring of its programming. The biggest moment of the restructuring came in 1998, when 24 Horas, the Jacobo Zabludovsky-anchored newscast, long a propaganda mouthpiece of the Mexican political regime, was canceled. More tabloid programming and imported formats began to be shown during peak slots, and the station’s brand identity was also refresh with a new logo created by Pablo Rovalo. After a period of ratings turmoil, viewership stabilized, but the channel had to contend now with its resurgent rivals at Imevisión, freshly privatized and renamed as TV Azteca.

After years of decline, particularly after 2012, as accusations of political bias in favor of then-President Enrique Peña Nieto began to hamper the broadcaster’s credibility, in 2016, the decision was made to relaunch entirely the station’s branding and programming. Under the supervision of Lee Hunt, Lorne Michaels and Elaine Cantwell (of Broadway Video), on 22 August 2016, XEW-TV was renamed as Las Estrellas, and introduced many changes to its programming schedule, including shorter and snappier telenovelas and news programming, as well as dropping many long-running programming in favour of programming oriented to a younger audience; it also vastly expanded its digital offerings. This was done to improve the public’s perception of the network and attract new viewers to it.

However, the changes went nowhere: the new brand was chastised as being too similar to a piñata and the new schedule generated a big ratings decline; as a result, by 2017, much of the new programming was canceled and the prime time telenovelas and news programming returned to its previous formats and were relocated to pre-relaunch timeslots. The mostly aged viewership of the station meant that these very drastic changes were too much for audience habits. A more muted presentation was put in place in 2020 partly to address the controversy with the new logo, with the multi-colored version (modified by 2017) being relegated to secondary use.

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