Some TV stations are tuning in to a sudden opportunity to sell what could be their most valuable asset – their airwaves. Cellphone companies covet them to satisfy the ever-growing appetite for mobile Internet use.
Stations thinking of selling are mostly small, such as niche ethnic outlets and cash-strapped public broadcasters; any sale represents a rare chance at big money. And even if they sell their “spectrum,” or broadcast frequency, they could still stay on the air by sharing bandwidth with another station.
In a national first, two local stations have begun a channel-sharing test: downtown L.A. public broadcaster KLCS (Channel 58), owned by the Los Angeles Unified School District, and KJLA (Channel 57), the flagship station of the bilingual Spanish-English LATV network.
So far, the experiment shows promise and thus could make a spectrum sale feasible, said Sabrina Thomas, general manager at KLCS.
Read the rest of the story in the March 17 edition of the Business Journal.
