Struggling Broadcaster: Difference between revisions
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* The station is broke or going bankrupt. The paycheques are bouncing and the announcers are begging for donations on-air in a telethon just to keep the show alive. If it's a non-profit educational outlet, the scoreboard during a [[PBS]]-style [[Viewers Like You|pledge break]] might actually show a negative number (perhaps to reflect the station spent money it doesn't have just to rent the board for the donation drive).
* The station is a low-budget independent, while its competitors are on better spots on the dial and backed by the stronger programming resources of the major networks. With limited resources and no budget to acquire better content, the only programming (other than minor-league sports matches and old public-domain movies) is [[Cloudcuckoolander]] nonsense which the station produces itself – on a shoestring.
* The station is on a [[Ultra High Frequency|high UHF channel]] in an era before manufacturers were legally required to include UHF tuners on every TV set. Of the first hundred pioneering [[American Television Stations]] who took a chance on UHF 14-83 soon after the US FCC opened these over-the-air channels in late 1952, eighty went broke – most within the first year. Many others were licenced but never built. [[Morton's Fork|Without any viewers, they couldn't get the network affiliation or the advertisers; without the network's programming, they couldn't get the viewers.]] If they had managed to get a network feed, they lost that affiliation to the first competitor to launch a VHF station. If no one could see the station, no one noticed when it silently went dark and never came back.
* The station is underpowered. On the medium-wave AM radio band, it may be on a "daytime" frequency on which it has to drop power or go completely off the air at sundown to protect a distant broadcaster on the same frequency. On FM or TV, it may have acquired the licence by buying an existing low-power "repeater", "rebroadcaster" or "translator" (which normally just provides a fill-in signal where there are gaps in a full-service main station's coverage) and re-purposing that allocation for an originating station.
* The station is licenced to serve a tiny or distant village, from which it can barely reach the larger city as a "rimshot", but isn't taken seriously as the announcers, the listeners or both are ''[[Hee Haw]]''-style hillbillies.
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== [[Real Life]] ==
* The [[DuMont]] Television Network (1946-56) was a hopelessly low-budget fourth terrestrial network in an era when most major cities only had two stations at best – and those stations mostly chose to affiliate with [[NBC]] or [[CBS]] because those were already the firmly established brands on network AM radio. There were no broadcast videotape recorders until 1956 (by which time the network was dead) so, by necessity, most content went out live – and the rest showed up at the individual stations as reels of movie film. Effectively "FOX thirty years before [[FOX]]" but run on a [[No Budget]] shoestring by a once-innovative manufacturer of television sets who did not survive.
* [[Turner Broadcasting System|Channel 17 Atlanta]], as a UHF independent
* Progressive talk radio network Air America lasted from 2004-2010 despite low ratings and income, and a damaging scandal about loans made to fund the network. At its height it had 65 affiliates across the United States, but constantly teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, actually tipping over into Chapter 11 status once in 2006 (after which it was sold by owner Piquant LLC to SLG Radio LLC). SLG owned it until 2009, when it sold Air America to Charles Kireker; at the start of 2010 AA ceased programming, filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy, and basically disappeared. Newsweb Corporation (the owner of Chicago AM station WCPT) currently owns the Air America brand and trademarks but as of this writing is doing nothing with them.
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