Utah Hockey Club, Comcast and Utah 16 (KUPX 16.1)

[CAwasinNJ]

Scripps is making a big deal out of carrying all the non-national games on Utah 16. For one thing, an article about Comcast not carrying the channel has been prominently displayed on the Fox 13 website for 2 days now. If the lineup I'm looking at is correct, Comcast chose to have cable channel 16 be the ion network and rebroadcast OTA 16.4 instead of relaying the main 16.1 channel and rebroadcasting Utah 16. That's a really odd choice to me, but maybe at the time they thought there wouldn't be that much interest in the new channel. Admittedly there isn't much on there I find all that interesting other than the NHL games, and when the channel launched those were out of town teams. Still, they have about a gazillion channels in the lineup, dozens of which I've never even heard of. I'm sure they could make room. The question that isn't answered by the article at Fox 13 (https://www.fox13now.com/sports/utah-hockey-club/comcast-to-ice-out-utah-hockey-club-fans-wont-carry-utah-16) is whether Scripps is demanding compensation for Comcast to carry Utah 16. I'm guessing they are. That might be the real sticking point.

The other thing Scripps is going big on is to preempt Fox programming on Fox 13 on Thursday to simulcast Utah 16's first game. Thursday is an important advertising day for TV and to push new network programming back to 10:05-12:05 indicates to me that they have confidence in the game's ability to draw an audience (not to mention that the reality shows being pushed back won't suffer.)

[rcvideo]

No wonder Comcast is losing subscribers. I live near Summit Park and cannot tune in 16 over the air. I know they’re supposedly working on getting translators on Quarry and Lewis peak where I get the other stations from but these things take time. I wonder why Scripps doesn’t put 16 on one of their sub channels?

[CAwasinNJ]

I'll assume those are separate thoughts.

13 duplicating something that's already available to the vast majority of the viewers in the market on another channel doesn't make economic sense and they are already pushing its bandwidth capacity with 7 subchannels, two of which are HD. I'm sure they'd love to have the extra potential viewers but the opportunity cost doesn't make it worth it. Only 2 of the Park City translators (Fox 13 and KUED 7) are even owned by their stations. The other 6 are owned by Summit County, presumably at county expense.