More OTA choices coming to Chicago
Many viewers without cable or satellite in the Chicago area got good news – in threes as two lower stations – and owners of three full-powered rivals – beef up their diginet slate:
– It seems like an unholy alliance from a Star Wars movie: Fox and Weigel are teaming up to launch Movies!, a new 24-hour diginet featuring uncut (except when it comes to inappropriate content) movies in widescreen form. In a released statement, Fox said Movies! intends “to create a new destination for movie fans that is fan-friendly and available for free via over-the-air television, and in many cases via local cable carriage.” The digital subchannel is being launched on seventeen Fox owned-and-operated stations, including WFLD here. Already, Fox’s My Network TV stations are home to African-American diginet Bounce on their dot-twos (except in Chicago, where WWME-CA has it on 23.2.)
-WPVN-CD, a Class A digital station, announced it has finally turned on its spankin’ new transmitter on top of the Trump International Hotel and Tower and at the same time, launched the country music-themed The Nashville Network diginet on its 24.3 subchannel on Friday. Much like the original cable channel of the same name, TNN features country music news, concerts, music videos, talk shows, and more. WPVN carries several diginet channels on its band, including RTV (24.1) and Tuff TV (24.2).
The original TNN was a cable network from 1983 until 2000, when under Viacom ownership, reformatted itself and became The National Network. In 2003, the name changed to Spike TV in order to target more male viewers.
– WOCK-CD also made an announcement regrading its new affiliation with a diginet network – the recently launched WeatherNation, which features forecasts, weather maps, local and national weather, severe weather coverage, and more, using experienced meteorologists and using technology from VIPIR Systems and HD Fusion from Weather Central for illustrating current conditions. Chicago is Weathernation’s third market launched, behind Boston and Seattle. WeatherNation is available on WOCK OTA 13.4 and also available on Xfinity (Comcast) cable channel 392. An Internet streaming feed is also available at Weathernation’s website at www.weathernationtv.com.