"Significantly Viewed" Stations

[Alan Gordon]

I was just wondering (hoping) that someone knew of a website listing what one's "significantly viewed" stations are?!


~Alan

 

[ngriffin]

I don't believe there is any such site. The best alternative is to look at the cable lineups in your immediate area using TitanTV, Zap2It, or another listings service. Generally if they carry a station from a nearby market, it is because it is "significantly viewed."

One print source may be useful. The Television and Cable Factbook lists all US commercial TV stations, along with coverage maps, and a listing of the counties that it receives ratings in. It's generally available in large city libraries and univeristy libraries (especially if the institution has a mass communication program).

If I remember correctly, "significantly viewed" stations must have a weekly cume (number of households that have viewed the station at least once) of 5% within that county.

 

[Alan Gordon]

I don't believe there is any such site. The best alternative is to look at the cable lineups in your immediate area using TitanTV, Zap2It, or another listings service. Generally if they carry a station from a nearby market, it is because it is "significantly viewed."

Yeah, that's kind of the thing. Originally, I looked it up using a circular that comes with a local paper, "The Albany Herald" and it had where you could look for the channel number in each community, so I did that and was pleased with the amount of channels added as we gained around four channels from the Tallahassee FL DMA, and two from the Dothan AL DMA, two or one from the Panama City FL DMA and WSB-TV from the Atlanta DMA.

However, I got a co-worker who subscribes to Mediacom cable to bring a pamplet showing the channels they get. It includes the local channels in my DMA (WALB, a NBC affiliate, WFXL, a FOX affiliate, WVAG, a UPN affiliate, WSST, a Independent, and a PBS), and then the "significantly viewed" stations, a CBS affiliate from the Columbus, GA DMA, a CBS affiliate from the Tallahassee FL DMA, a ABC from the Columbus GA DMA and a ABC affiliate from the Atlanta GA DMA. The WB! is cable-only, and since there is only one PBS in the state of Georgia (no surprise there) and it's carried by a repeater throughout the state of GA, they only chose to carry one of the PBS's in my DMA, the Pelham GA affiliate. Though I don't know that much about how the whole "significantly viewed" stations work, I can only assume that only WALB and WFXL have the rights to distribute NBC and FOX programming to our DMA. It's just kind of strange to me how it works as there are several stations I'm kind of surprised with. I mean, until I bought my Zenith Silver Sensor antenna, I could get the FOX affiliates out of Columbus and Bainbride (Tallhassee DMA) better than I could get our local FOX affiliate. I'm in a Grade A signal area for a FOX affiliate, a NBC affilate and (I think) two PBS repeater towers. I'm also in the Grade B signal area for (I believe) TWO Fox stations, and (I believe) TWO NBC stations. I'm also in a Grade B signal area for TWO CBS (both are "significantly viewed") and TWO ABC affiliates (one of them "significantly viewed"). The weird thing to me is too, is that WSB-TV, an Atlanta GA affiliate is offered, but I don't see how that could be considered "significantly viewed" unless you have cable to view it as we are WAY too far away to pick it up, so I'm just trying to understand why certain stations got picked and others didn't.

~Alan<~~~~~~~~~~~~Who is "significantly viewed"...