Saturday, February 28, 2009

Call it MyTube

It's 20 years after the under appreciated “Weird Al” vehicle UHF and while it may have seemed just a dream of everyday people to actually be in charge of a TV station it turns out you don’t have to win a station in a poker game. You can buy it for $1 when the economy tanks.

CTV Television Inc. is looking to sell CKX-TV in Brandon, MB, offering it to CBC for $1 (the channel airs CBC programming) and after the Corp turned that down the station is up for sale to any takers. You can have a TV station for the cost of the land in Brandon, MB if you can show the CRTC you could run things. I haven’t lived in Manitoba for a few years but I doubt that land is going to set you back a whole lot. You get the building, the equipment, even the staff!

This is among the local news options Canadians look to lose in the near future as CTV is also going to fail to renew licenses at its Windsor and Wingham, ON stations and CanWest is checking on its options (including sale) of stations right across the country in places such as Victoria, Red Deer and Hamilton. This is just TV because newspapers are another story.

There are about three weeks left before CTV just opts to let the station go dark when the license expires August 1 so I think my wife and I will see what it would take to own a station in this new economy. We may not buy the station but maybe we’ll end up doing some leg work for some George Newmans out there just waiting to bring us their version of “Wheel of Fish.”