With CTV having the rights to 4pm Sunday NFL football games starting this season, the network is forced (or, well, is forcing itself) to pre-empt its local 6pm newscast on Sundays until mid-January for stations in the CDT, EDT and ADT time zones.
At first, it looked like CTV was going to air the local news after the football game, at 7:30pm ET, but now it looks like most stations are simply going to air SportsCentre to fill time until 8pm.
The situation varies a lot by market. In Atlantic Canada, there’s just the early game, so the Sunday newscast is unaffected. In Saskatchewan, Alberta and B.C., the late game ends before 6pm, so no schedule change is needed there. In Kitchener, Winnipeg and Northern Ontario, as well as for new CTV affiliate CKPR in Thunder Bay, the plan is still to air a local newscast after the football game, which will likely start late a lot of the time.
For CTV Montreal, whose Sunday evening newscast draws tens of thousands of viewers, they’ve decided to do a live webcast of the 6pm show starting tonight. (You can watch a cheesy promo of it here.) The webcast can be seen on their website, montreal.ctvnews.ca.
I haven’t seen any announcements about other CTV stations trying this.
This change also means that for Montreal, there will be only one local newscast in English at 6pm Sundays: Global. CBC airs its weekly Disney/kids movie Sunday evenings. It’ll be interesting to see if Global capitalizes on this to try to drive up viewership for that time period in Montreal, which is historically one of its weakest markets.
In Ottawa, viewers don’t even get the choice of Global. They have retransmitters of Global Toronto, City Toronto and CHCH Hamilton, and CTV Two Ottawa, which doesn’t have evening newscasts.
After the second week of the NFL playoffs in mid-January, the schedule will return to normal, and the 6pm Sunday newscasts will return.
I wonder what percentage of people haven’t already seen the major stories of the day on social media by the time the evening newscast comes around. I guess for purely local stuff there’s a need but even then, that stuff gets tweeted out during the day.
I’m pretty sure the 100,000+ people who watch CTV News at 6 aren’t doing it for no reason.
Actually you’d be surprised how many people do things out of habit.
If that’s the case, then who cares?
But won’t this move hurt CTV Montreal’s ad revenues?
Obviously CTV believes the additional revenues from 4pm NFL games are more desirable than those from 6pm local newscasts in eastern Canada.
Obviously CTV believes the additional revenues from 4pm simsub ads on NFL games are more desirable than those from 6pm local newscasts in eastern Canada.
Fixed that for you.
I have to wonder if that national ad revenue gets property attributed to the local station, or will they continue to claim the local stations are making less revenue?
Depends how you define “properly”. National ads are definitely attributed to local stations, at least in terms of how the CRTC creates financial summaries. Regardless, the CRTC doesn’t publicly break down finances by individual station, and the numbers for the networks show they’re about breaking even.
CTV Montreal is wholly owned by the CTV network, which in turn is owned by Bell Media. Bell earns most of its profits through its cable systems, its satellite systems, its internet systems, its cellphone systems, and its regular telephone systems. CTV broadcast stations are not expected to earn much of a profit. I f they did, it would indicate that people were watching broadcast television rather than putting out the big bucks to subscribe to cable and satellite systems, and this would result in a decrease in Bell’s profits.
The Global Montreal weekend 6pm newscasts is often pre-empted by a sporting event they broadcast(usually golf). The golf event they broadcast this afternoon is suppose to finish broadcasting at 6pm. I suspect today’s Global Montreal Sunday newscast at 6pm, won’t begin at 6pm.
This is true, though the golf season is almost over, so this won’t last long.
Maybe you know. Noticed several weeks ago, Andre Corbeil took over the Als beat from Randy Tieman. Who’s covering the Impact now for CTV Montreal? Still Andre Corbeil or has moved to Brian Wilde(or maybe no one)? There’s no weekly Impact report on CTV Montreal.
Ottawa will get no local newscast until 11 pm from the CBC and 11:30 from CTV. During major holidays, we don’t get local newscasts either…they pipe in the news from Toronto or have no newscast at all.
Doesn’t matter to me. I don’t watch football and I have no TV therefore, I have to watch it on the web regardless. I really appreciated when they started to put the entire newscast online – not just the first 10-15 mins before the first commercial.
My only pet peeve, the audio that runs through some of time when there’s no anchor speaking is a lot higher than the normal audio. I usually have to prep for it and be ready to mute the audio.
They could place it on a sub-channel for OTA. Every Sunday on 12.2
They can create a 12.2 place holder the way CKMI-DT does with it’s 15.2
And every Sunday at 6pm present the local news.
Better yet, perhaps both stations can have a weather radar, and news updates on their x.2 sub-channels the way WCAX does with it’s 3.2.
Oh wait! I guess they believe they’ll get more viewers to stream the local news on the net, than over the air.
Ya! sure. Good luck with that. Way easier ways to get the local news with Twits, online Newspapers, and be done within 5-10 minutes, than to sit through a linear 1 hour show.
Wrong product aimed to the wrong crowd.
Learn to you use OTA sub-channels instead.
“In Saskatchewan, Alberta and B.C., the late game ends before 6pm, so no schedule change is needed there.”
For Saskatchewan, that is correct for now until Nov. 2. Saskatchewan does not change their clocks so starting on Nov. 2, the late game will end after 6:00 pm and there will be a schedule change. Saskatchewan is in sync with Alberta right now but will be in sync with Manitoba on Nov. 2.