SYRACUSE – This morning was the debut of Chris Brandolino as morning and noon meteorologist at WSYR-TV in Syracue.
Brandolino is coming back to Central New York after spending two years working for the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) in Australia.
Before going down under, he spent more than a decade working for cross-town rival WSTM.
UTICA – We here at CNY Television News would like to send our congrats out to WKTV for making it 60 years!
The station first signed on the air December 1, 1949. Originally on channel 13, they moved to channel 2 in the 60’s.
You can view their anniversary section here.
SYRACUSE – WSYR, News Channel 9, will be airing a mayoral debate between the three Syracuse mayoral candidates tonight at seven.
The candidates include Stephanie Miner, Steve Kimatian, and Otis Jennings.
Last night, the station aired the debate between three candidates for the N-23rd district seat in the US House of Representatives.
SYRACUSE – WSYR-TV-News Channel 9 and WWTI-ABC 50, are to air a debate between the 23rd District candidates tonight at seven.
The debate was between Democrat Bill Owens, Republican Dede Scozzafava, and Conservative Doug Hoffman.
Unlike originally planned, the debate will air tonight instead of Monday. Furthermore, members of the media were invited to attend, and chairs were setup in the studio during the debate, which is also a change from the original plan.
You can see a recap of the debate, along with a slideshow, and tonight a video, here.
UTICA – News Channel 2 sports anchor Brian Sandler will be leaving WKTV after Friday, says the station.
Sandler’s last broadcast will be Sports Express on Friday night during the eleven o’clock newscast. He has been with WKTV since 2004, when he was hired one month after his graduation from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University.
He will be heading to News 10 Now, based out of Syracuse.
You can read more from WKTV here.
For those of you old enough to remember Mike Price as the Baron appearing on WSYR(9) back in the 60’s, The Baron will return from the crypt tonight at 7 PM on WSYR-TV and for a few other appearances including hosting a movie on Halloween night.
You can visit the WSYR web site for more details by clicking here.
Rumblings in the Syracuse area are that some air staff at Barrington Broadcasting Group owned WSTM/WSTQ are going to be let go as their contracts expire. While the station isn’t likely to admit any impending dismissals, there may be some truth to the rumor since Barrington Broadcasting Group is still loosing money according to the the past quarter’s financial report posted on their web site. Unless the economy improves a lot (and fast!) BBG will probably face another round of cuts at its stations around the country.
Unless you start to see faces disappearing from their daily news shows and the “About Us” section on their web site then put this one in the rumor junk bin. Otherwise, keep a close watch on what goes on at WSTM/WSTQ.
*UPDATE* – A little digging and a contact or two tells me that this rumor is most likely false. It is true that BBG may still be bleeding dollars but then so are many of the other stations in town until the economy improves. As for how the rumor got started, the speculation is that it may be a disgruntled former employee of one of the Syracuse stations trying to stir up trouble. So chuck this rumor into the garbage bin but keep an eye on events at the Syracuse stations anyway.
On a completely unrelated topic, if the employee is disgruntled now were they gruntled before and if he/she was, just what is being gruntled anyway? Does it hurt to be disgruntled? Inquiring minds just wonder about trivial stuff like this.
WSYR-TV (9) in Syracuse recently replaced their character generating equipment with an HD compatible system. The new gear generates the crawls you see at the bottom of the screen and the overall graphics used on the air. Quite noticeable are the new side bar graphics that replace the black bars on the sides of an SD picture when the station goes into local programming.
The new equipment will let the station add weather crawls and other information to their network HD programming instead of having to switch back to SD format when weather or other alerts need to be broadcast. Expect to see a lot of use for it this winter with school closing notices in bad weather.
This may be the start of the upgrades required to give the station HD capabilities for local programming. Consumer and “prosumer” level HD cameras and the ready availability of digital editing equipment using a computer has made even home videos in HD possible. Unless the support gear in a TV station (switchers, displays, signal splitters and amplifiers, etc) is also HD capable there won’t be much, if any, local HD programming available at the local level.
Many stations are purchasing newer cameras for ENG (news gathering) that are HD ready but are temporarily using them in the older SD mode until the rest of the station’s support equipment can catch up. Don’t expect to see local news in HD any time soon though. The prices for the rest of the gear a station needs to broadcast HD haven’t kept pace with the drop in camera prices.
WTVH(TV-5) in Syracuse has replaced some encoding equipment that generates their DTV signal. Several Syracuse area stations that used the same first generation gear have had problems with the encoders overheating then generating intermittent HD signals.
A side note is that WTVH is now also carrying a standard definition version of their HD signal on their 5.2 sub channel. What exactly they’ll do with this secondary signal isn’t clear but the local Syracuse Fox affiliate (68) uses a similar side channel to feed their SD video to the DirecTV and Dish satellite services. *UPDATE* – Word is that the 5.2 channel is a test of the SD encoder in the new equipment. As far as is known now, there is no plan for an additional video channel on the WTVH-DT signal. The SD channel could possibly remain though. At least it would enable a swift temporary return to the air if the WSTM -DT transmitter died again as it did a while ago.
For those of you getting WTVH over the air their signal is now rock solid both in HD and the new (temporary?) SD channels.
WTVH(TV-5) is owned by Granite Broadcasting but operated by Barrington Broadcasting Group. Barrington owns NBC affiliate WSTM(TV-3) and low power CW affiliate WSTQ (TV-14).
UTICA – Earlier this week the website for WKTV, News Channel 2 was down for thirty hours.
From a sideline standpoint, it looks like someone deleted the nameserver entry in the DNS file for wktv.com.
The problem with that type of problem is it takes time for it to propegate around the internet after changes are made.
The weather blog, hosted at Linkjam was not affected.
