Obit for Dead Air

It's been one year.

America's transition to digital broadcasting is now out of the toddler stage and into the terrible twos. For kids, this is the exploring stage, and for digital broadcasting we're beginning to see the emergence of new and novel ways for stations to utilize their multicasting capabilities.

Multicasting is possible because spectrum space was given to each over-the-air TV station in exchange for relinquishing their analog portion. And this digital bandwidth – with efficient compression – can actually contain several discreet signals. The end result is the opportunity for broadcasting “sub-channels” and there's been a lot of exploration with these ancillary program streams.

Cost-effective networks such as Retro TV are one such patch-and-go solution. A couple of music video programming services have come and gone, hoping to attract MTV refugees unable to find actual music content on a cable channel.

But certainly once of the biggest applications was for a station to launch a 24-hour sub-channel weather service with plenty of local origination inserts, utilizing in-house station meteorologists and repurposing graphics from each newscast.  But how many local weather channels does one TV market need? Why in the world should the top three or four network affiliates in one market all push virtually the same content out on three or four sub-channels? 

I recognize the concept of challenge programming, but in this case doesn't counter programming make more sense?  A few stations seem to "get it" and are trying interesting and unique approaches toward utilization of their sub-channel spectrum. One of these catchng my eye was Meredith Broadcasting's on-the-air obituary service.

And think about it – the traditional distribution service for funeral, memorial and obit announcements was the local newspaper. Local newspapers continue to drop like flies, either closing altogether, or scaling back, sometimes to weekly or bi-weekly publication.  Local funeral directors found area residents not finding or missing funeral information. Why shouldn't over-the-air fill the void?

So execs at WNEM TV 5 in Michigan launched their on-air service last fall, aimed at a public used to reading obituaries in black and white, straight from the newspaper. Now Meredith's taking the idea to its 11 other stations, and syndicating it to 20 other non-Meredith stations, so far – and in talks with 15 more including stations in Columbus, Ohio, Reno Nevada, and Charleston, West Virginia.

Meredith supplies the technology and expertise while taking a share of the revenue. They won't reveal the exact revenue spilt.  But the stations charge less for the service than local newspapers, and the medium offers more multimedia possibilities than print.

Mid-Michigan residents can now see obituaries on television and the Internet from TV5 and MY5. Families can't buy obits directly from TV, but must go through participating funeral homes equipped with proprietary On-Air Notification Entry (ONE) software, which also ties the announcement into the stations' web site -- which makes sense, because the demographic for those reading obits doesn't include a large portion of the "computer savvy".

I think the quote from WSAZ GM Don Ray described it well:

“Obituaries are one of those things newspapers have always done and thought it was a birthright, but when you look there was room for improvement, doing them on TV and online.”

And perhaps a new and better rewrite of the old TV tech term “dead air.”


Jim Furrer