quote:
...and that is because it is a no-brainer. CBS is already televising the game. There is no additional cost decision to be made.
If they aren't televising the A&M game, why would they televise almost anything else on Thursday or Friday. Only a very few have any local interest.
I really have a hard time believing that they are that big a group of fools.
The additional cost decision to be made isn't really a cost decision, it's a revenue decision.
That local break they are using (instead of running that afternoon game, which happens to be ours) has way more local commercial inventory available, and chances are, the money is already spent by whatever advertisers have bought that local time. Running the A&M game would cause them to lose that revenue mainly because they don't have as many local commercials they can run during a game as opposed to local programming.
Another issue (and this, you'd have to talk to their sales manager about...and even then they probably wouldn't tell you) is that the way sports events are sold (especially one like the tournament) makes it harder to get any additional money out of advertisers.
Here's (roughly) how it works. You're a TV station running the minimum number of games, and you sell that sports inventory based on that amount. You don't get any additional money by airing the additional games unless you sell them specifically, and the nature of the tournament (not knowing where teams will play, much less when, until a couple of days before) makes that difficult.
The added layer of difficulty is that Dallas is a huge media market and KTVT is corporate owned, so any money lost by KTVT is lost by CBS Corp on the whole, and that's not gonna fly.
I think the best play here would be to address it through the sales management at KTVT and let them know that there's a large percentage of Aggies in the viewing area that will find other places to get their entertainment than CBS owned/operated affiliates in the market, whether that's watching any CBS content on Hulu, listening to KRLD or any other CBS radio stations in the area, and so on.