So much for a Thursday on which most people would have been focused on the first day of the Madness known as the NCAA College Basketball Tournament. Except maybe for people working in the television business.

Thursday afternoon, just as the second round of games was tipping off, the surprise announcement out of South Florida that a local television station was dropping, or losing–depending on whose account you believe–its network affiliation. It’s been over a decade since the last major market affiliation switch. 2014 was when CBS announced it was moving from its longtime home in Indianapolis at WISH-TV, which was being sold by LIN Media to Media General, over to Tribune Broadcasting’s WTTV, effective January 1st, 2015.

More than a decade later, the breaking news from Miami was that the ABC network would be leaving WPLG, its home for nearly 70 years, dating back to when Channel 10 in Miami signed on the air as WPST. But this August, ABC’s new home in South Florida would be…cross-town rival WSVN. The Sunbeam-owned Fox affiliate on Channel 7? Well, not exactly. The new “ABC Miami” as it will be called, will be operated by Sunbeam, but seen on channel 7.2. That is a digital “sub-channel” of the primary Channel 7 signal (which is actually on the frequency of what is technically Channel 9, but don’t get us started on the weirdness of stations broadcasting with their legacy branding but on what are different channels.)

The news of ABC moving was labeled as “seismic” in some quarters. And in this industry, that wasn’t hyperbole. It’s just because affiliation moves are pretty rare, especially in a major market like Miami. Though to be fair, over the years, the market has seen its share of station and network moves. More unusual for the current day was that a “big four” network would willingly move from being on one station’s main (or .1) signal–to another’s “subchannels” that were made possible by the 2009 transition to digital television. On the current DTV standard, local broadcasters use digital encoding technology to “multiplex” their feeds onto a single signal, which allows for multiple channels to be broadcast by a single transmitter for each station. Most local TV stations now carry so-called “digi-nets” on these subchannels. Smaller networks such as MeTV, Living Well, H&I, CourtTV, and a long list of others. Today, WSVN carries the Black audience targeted “365BLK” network on its 7.2 subchannel.

Typically, a television station with a primary ABC, CBS, FOX, or NBC affiliation on its main channel typically doesn’t have another of the three remaining major networks on a digital subchannel. In the larger, major markets, each network affiliate would be carried a stand-alone, full-power station.

That was before Thursday.

The expected press releases were issued from both WPLG and WSVN. WPLG pointed the blame at ABC and its parent company, Disney. The station’s General Manager, E.R. Bert Medina, put it this way: “Our job is to serve this community with news and local programming, that’s why we have an FCC license. If we agreed to the ABC terms, that mission would have suffered." Medina went on to say that a big reason that WPLG couldn’t reach a deal was because the exclusivity of ABC programming is disappearing. Meaning more of the network’s shows also now appear on streaming services like Hulu and Disney+, thus impacting the value of what the station has been paying to be the exclusive home to. Medina spellied it out in no uncertain terms: “We no longer feel we are getting what we pay for.”

But within an hour after WPLG’s release that it was going to no longer be an ABC affiliate come August 4th, the proverbial second shoe dropped when Sunbeam’s WSVN announced that it had landed the new “ABC Miami” and it would be on digital channel 7.2. WSVN has been a very successful Fox affiliate, but perhaps an even more successful local news operation in Miami, which would undoubtedly be supporting, at least in some fashion, the new local newscasts on ABC Miami.

The questions about how all this came to be would spin up faster than a late-season hurricane threatening South Florida.

Our friends at TheDesk.Net reported that WPLG’s network contract had expired at the end of 2024, but both sides had continued negotiating towards securing a new agreement. That’s reasonable to assume, given that these negotiations sometimes go into “extra innings.” However, Disney/ABC was clearly working on alternatives in the event that it couldn’t reach a deal. Those options could have included moving ABC’s affiliation to another Miami-based station. That might have been either current UniMas-owned WAMI or CW affiliate WSFL-TV. The latter might have proven a friendly home, as that station is owned by Scripps, which currently owns ABC affiliates in several other major markets–including WFTS in nearby Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, Florida.

But we’ve heard a few industry observers wonder aloud if there might have been another factor at play here. Was ABC rebuffed in a possible effort to actually acquire WPLG from Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway? The idea isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. Berkshire Hathaway doesn’t own any other television stations, it acquired WPLG in 2014 from the former Post-Newsweek company controlled by the Graham family, after they sold _The Washington Post_to Jeff Bezos. The family then formed Graham Holdings, spinning off WPLG to Berkshire, which had been a major investor in Post-Newsweek. Both CBS and NBC own their stations in Miami-Fort Lauderdale, and it would be reasonable to assume that ABC would like to own its outlet in the nation’s 18th largest market. Is it possible that Bob Iger and company were given the cold shoulder to that idea, so, in turn, proffered a network contract with less-than-favorable terms to WPLG, who wouldn’t budge in these extended negotiations?

Nobody is saying that is what happened, but it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility. However, another thing to consider is what happened the day before the news broke in Miami, some 1,787 miles north in the decidedly cooler environment of St. Paul, Minnesota. There, inside the Warren Burger US Courthouse, the United States 8th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments on whether or not the Federal Communications Commission in 2023 acted appropriately in maintaining its rules on broadcast station ownership. Broadcasters, represented by their trade organization, the National Association of Broadcasters, argued that the FCC’s rules, including the ones that prevent mergers between the top four stations in a given market (typically the ones affiliated with the “big four” networks of ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC) are threatening the very future of broadcasting business in this country.

While the court case is important and is being closely watched, the reality is that the current FCC Chairman, Republican Brendan Carr, opposes the ownership rules and is likely to dismantle them. That would give broadcasters freedom from the government restrictions on how many stations one company can own, both in a single local market, as well as across the entire nation. Broadcasters argue that they need this freedom to survive in a digital world where the internet and its giants like Google, Amazon and Microsoft can–and do compete for viewers and advertising dollars in every corner of the country.

Should the deregulation that the Trump administration has championed in its blitz to reshape all aspects of the federal government arrive at the FCC, it is entirely plausible that the moves in Miami that were announced on this Thursday could play out in many ways and the results could be “coming soon” to a television set near you.

Hope your bracket isn’t busted already.

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