Beckley / Bluefield WV Locals Coming!
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Just kidding about the wing dish. The only reason to put one up is if someone has an EA and you have los for the 118.7.
I don't live in the area, but visit very often and I had forgotten about the ratio of "local" channels the cable companies carry versus what DISH can legally carry.
And while I hate to slam the Bluefield-Beckley TV market too much, the quality of the newscasts are overall better from Charleston or Roanoke. WVVA and WVNS however are not too bad. On the other hand, there's WOAY...
So DISH adding locals may not sway too many away from cable to satellite, unless it drastically lowers their pay TV bill. But it will be a nice plus for existing DISH subs and those who can only get one or maybe two channels off an antenna.
As a side note, I pulled up a DMA map from the FCC website. I am somewhat surprised that Bland county is NOT in the Beckley-Bluefield market. So, one can live just south of East River Mtn (the VA-WV) and actually see the WVVA tower with the naked eye and not be able to get them if they're a DISH sub. Of course, these subs would be eligibile for the Roanoke locals, but it still seems geographically odd.
Eric
Beckley-Bluefield market details:
This is one of the most rural markets in the country, and has very rugged terrain.
The historic stations are (historic channel numbers from the pre-DT days) :
WOAY - 4 ABC in Oak Hill
WVVA - 6 NBC in Bluefield
To that was added in the mid-90s, WVNS - 59, which has alternated between Fox and CBS several times. While listed as "Lewisburg", the transmitter is actually well to the west of Lewisburg.
There is no place in the market where more than one major network station can clearly be received OTA. That means that esentually everybody has cable or a dish, and always has had, even back when cable was nothing more that "CATV" a community antenna. BUD, and then DBS were godsends to the people of this area, as cable operators were mostly crooks who provided a few ghostridden channels for a high price.
Because of the historic absence of CBS (and Fox, when it launched) cable has always added a mix of channels from the Roanoke-Lynchburg, Huntington-Charleston, and/or Tri-Cities markets.
Really, the market could cease to exist tommorrow and no one would notice. If the H-C locals appeared on the WV side, and the R-L or Tri-Cites on the VA side, no one would mind, and the extremely poor and rural nature of the market makes selling ads there a marginal proposition at best. News budgets, and thus news production quality, is laughable. Really nothing much happens worthy of mention.
The current dial is:
WOAY - ABC 4 (50)
WVVA - NBC 6 (46)
-- 6.2 The CW
-- 6.3 RTN
WSWP PBS 9 (10) really just a repeater of WPBY in Huntington
WLFB - religious 40 (40) repeater of a religious station from the Tri Cities area.
WVNS - CBS 59 (8) semi-repeater of co-owned WOWK in Huntington, although it does some of its own news and has somewhat different syndicated programming.
-- 59.2 Fox with MY Network's primetime shown over the late night hours.
A subset of interest is the Snowshoe Mountain ski resort. It is located at the very northern tip of Pocahontas County, WV, and at nearly 5K feet ASL. While technically in that market, you cannot receive any of the markets stations there. But you can get channels from Clarksburg, Charleston, Harrisonburg, Charlotesville, and Roanoke. The resorts cable is weird mix, and many people have dishes subscribed to their accounts at their primary resicencs, since the place is in the spot of all of those markets, and at lest 3 more.
This is one of the most rural markets in the country, and has very rugged terrain.
The historic stations are (historic channel numbers from the pre-DT days) :
WOAY - 4 ABC in Oak Hill
WVVA - 6 NBC in Bluefield
To that was added in the mid-90s, WVNS - 59, which has alternated between Fox and CBS several times. While listed as "Lewisburg", the transmitter is actually well to the west of Lewisburg.
There is no place in the market where more than one major network station can clearly be received OTA. That means that esentually everybody has cable or a dish, and always has had, even back when cable was nothing more that "CATV" a community antenna. BUD, and then DBS were godsends to the people of this area, as cable operators were mostly crooks who provided a few ghostridden channels for a high price.
Because of the historic absence of CBS (and Fox, when it launched) cable has always added a mix of channels from the Roanoke-Lynchburg, Huntington-Charleston, and/or Tri-Cities markets.
Really, the market could cease to exist tommorrow and no one would notice. If the H-C locals appeared on the WV side, and the R-L or Tri-Cites on the VA side, no one would mind, and the extremely poor and rural nature of the market makes selling ads there a marginal proposition at best. News budgets, and thus news production quality, is laughable. Really nothing much happens worthy of mention.
The current dial is:
WOAY - ABC 4 (50)
WVVA - NBC 6 (46)
-- 6.2 The CW
-- 6.3 RTN
WSWP PBS 9 (10) really just a repeater of WPBY in Huntington
WLFB - religious 40 (40) repeater of a religious station from the Tri Cities area.
WVNS - CBS 59 (8) semi-repeater of co-owned WOWK in Huntington, although it does some of its own news and has somewhat different syndicated programming.
-- 59.2 Fox with MY Network's primetime shown over the late night hours.
A subset of interest is the Snowshoe Mountain ski resort. It is located at the very northern tip of Pocahontas County, WV, and at nearly 5K feet ASL. While technically in that market, you cannot receive any of the markets stations there. But you can get channels from Clarksburg, Charleston, Harrisonburg, Charlotesville, and Roanoke. The resorts cable is weird mix, and many people have dishes subscribed to their accounts at their primary resicencs, since the place is in the spot of all of those markets, and at lest 3 more.
