Thursday, July 13, 2017

Univision To Buy Dark WMGM-TV

Spanish-language TV broadcaster Univision is buying the former WMGM-TV NBC40 airwaves in the Atlantic City area for $6 million. Thousands at the Jersey Shore watched the local station, home to hurricane tracker Dan Skeldon, before it went dark in early 2015.

According to philly.com, Univision confirmed the purchase of the station, identified by the call letters WMGM and which has one of the strongest signals in the Atlantic City area,  from LocustPoint Networks LLC, based in California. The deal was contained in government filings and first reported by trade publication tvnewscheck.com.

But the station’s exact fate is still uncertain. NBC40 lost its independent network affiliation, a crippling blow to the small TV station that allowed Comcast-owned NBC10 in Philadelphia to consolidate the TV market’s audience.

LocustPoint, a speculator in TV stations, bought WMGM with the apparent intent to sell it as part of the recent Federal Communications Commission airwaves auction that reallocated the nation’s airwaves for smartphones and mobile devices.

Ten Philadelphia-area TV stations, among them WFMZ-TV, WGTW-TV, and WMCN-TV, sold spectrum for about $1 billion in that auction earlier this year, according to the FCC’s data.

A big buyer in the auction was cable giant Comcast Corp., which spent $1.7 billion on wireless spectrum as it seeks to launch its own wireless product branded as Xfinity Mobile.

2 comments:

  1. WMGM isn't dark, they are very much alive on their over-the-air signal on UHF digital channel 36 (virtual channel 40) and on Comcast in Atlantic City. In the future you should be careful how you phrase the title of an article.

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  2. WMGM will be sold to NBCUniversal soon.

    ReplyDelete