Though we have to draw some inferences to get there, it appears that most, quite possibly all terrestrial superstations have a higher profit margin than Netflix

Another data point in our long-running thread.

On December 10th, 2018, Katz Broadcasting (owned by the E. W. Scripps Company) announced that they would relaunch Court TV as an over-the-air network following the acquisition of the intellectual property rights to the Court TV name and the pre-2008 Court TV original programming library from Turner Broadcasting System and Warner Bros. Entertainment. Scripps announced affiliation deals with Tribune Media and Univision Communications at that date, in addition to existing Scripps-owned stations. Further deals with Meredith Corporation, Nexstar Media Group (which was in the process of acquiring Tribune; the deal closed in September 2019), Tegna, and Quincy Media were announced on May 2, 2019.

The relaunched Court TV features live court coverage with original Court TV anchor Vinnie Politan as lead anchor, Court TV and CNN producers John Alleva and Scott Tufts as vice presidents and managing editors. The network began broadcasting on May 8, 2019.

Busy week, but I want to make a few quick points on this one.

Six years ago, just as terrestrial superstations were taking off, Nielsen released a study claiming that the over-the-air market was small and shrinking. The National Association of Broadcasters said their data showed just the opposite. Every bit of news we've seen since then suggests that Nielsen was wrong.

Not only has the industry (despite a near complete lack of hype) grown at a rapid and, more importantly, sustained clip, but the companies pushing hardest have been the owners of large numbers of TV stations. Not only are they the ones with skin in the game; they also have access to the most complete proprietary data. Pretty much every company in a position to know what's going on has expanded their presence in the market.

Where we do have head to head comparisons, the granddaddy of the industry, MeTV routinely dominates its much better positioned direct competitors like TVland. That's probably why CBS went with Weigel and passed over Viacom when starting Decades.

In addition to more stations constantly popping up, the individual superstations are becoming more ambitious, which brings us to a couple of points specifically about CourtTV. First, I believe this is the first case of a cable channel (even a dormant one) making the transition to OTA. CourtTV is still a brand of some value and considerable name recognition. The fact that it's showing up over the air rather than on cable tells you something about the growth and profit potential of the two media.

Second, this was not done on the cheap by Scripps. They not only acquired the original name and talent rather than putting together a knock-off; they went one step further and bought the original content library. That's a strong indicator of a serious long term commitment.

(By comparison, at least one very heavily hyped media company own far less of  its content than most people including journalists and investors realize, but that's a topic for another post.)