Ion Television
Ion Television (currently known on-air as simply Ion) is an American broadcast television network owned by the Scripps Networks subsidiary of the E. W. Scripps Company. The network first began broadcasting on August 31, 1998, as Pax TV, focusing primarily on family-oriented entertainment programming. It rebranded as i: Independent Television (commonly referred to as "i") on July 1, 2005, converting into a general entertainment network featuring recent and older acquired programs. The network adopted its identity as Ion Television on January 29, 2007, and airs programming in daily binge blocks of one program, usually acquired procedural dramas. The network also carries some holiday specials and films before Christmas.
Type
Broadcast television network
United States
Nationwide
English
January 1995 (as inTV)
August 31, 1998
- inTV (1995–98)
- Pax TV (1998–2005)
- i: Independent Television (2005–2007)
Ion is available throughout most of the United States through its group of 44 owned-and-operated stations and 20 network affiliates, as well as through distribution on pay-TV providers and streaming services; since 2014, the network has also increased affiliate distribution in several markets through the digital subchannels of local television stations owned by companies such as Gray Television and Nexstar Media Group where the network is unable to maintain a main channel affiliation with or own a standalone station, for the same purpose as the distribution of Ion's main network feed via pay-TV providers and streaming services.
The network's stations cover all of the top 20 U.S. markets and 37 of the top 50 markets.[1] Ion's owned-and-operated stations cover 64.8% of the United States population, by far the most of any U.S. station ownership group; it is able to circumvent the legal limit of covering 39% of the population because all of its stations operate on the UHF television band, which is subject to a discount in regard to that limit. In the digital age, the restoration of the UHF discount has proven controversial with other broadcast groups and FCC rulings between presidential administrations, though as the network's parent company mainly acquired low-performing stations and stations on the fringes of markets which targeted lower-profile cities in the analog age, it has not been an issue with Ion Media itself.[2]
Related services[edit]
Multiplexing[edit]
Ion Television's stations have made notable use of "multiplexing" or splitting a digital broadcast television signal into separate subchannels. The network's stations usually carry up to six of these digital subchannels (in contrast with most other full-power stations, which usually carry a maximum of four channels over the same signal), each of which broadcast separate networks. Due to the bandwidth limitations caused by its carriage of multiple subchannels over a single broadcast signal, only the primary Ion network feed is transmitted in high definition, a mode of operation that remains under Scripps ownership. A small number of Ion stations have channel sharing agreements with other broadcasters after the FCC's 2017 spectrum re-allocation auction, while others such as Atlanta-area station WPXA-TV contract with other lower-power stations in a market to provide a full-power signal, such as Telemundo affiliate WKTB-CD.
Differences between Ion and other broadcast networks[edit]
Ion follows a programming strategy similar to major cable networks, with majority of its schedule being filled by acquired broadcast and cable drama series, few original programs, holiday films and other original movies, and theatrically released movies sourced mainly from major film studios, with its entertainment programming schedule occupying 18 hours of its daily broadcast schedule. Ion Television, unlike other broadcast networks, does not necessarily allow its owned-and-operated stations and affiliates to air syndicated programming during the daytime and late night hours.
In the United States, syndicated programming accounts for a majority of the revenue of local network-affiliated and independent stations. Network programming (on stations that have a network affiliation), newscasts or other locally produced programs (if a station carries any), and infomercials make up the rest. Since paid programming once made up a relatively sizable portion of Ion's schedule (prior to 2008), the benefit is that it provides the main source of revenue. However, this is also a drawback as, in the past, Ion had relied more on infomercials rather than sitcoms and dramas; sponsors of television series often have qualms about their message being lost on stations whose primary content is infomercials and other paid programming. Ion Television's reliance on mostly paid programming has decreased since the late 2000s, as a result of the network's expansion of entertainment programming to additional daytime and late night timeslots, and in particular, the later creation of the infomercial-dedicated subchannel service Ion Shop. Ion Television stations also lack locally produced programming; most of its stations had aired newscasts from other local network-affiliated stations until the rebrand as i, and have even produced their own community affairs shows; however, local programming has since become virtually non-existent on most of Ion's O&Os and affiliates, and was entirely discontinued with the 2019 repeal of the Main Studio rule by the FCC.
In effect, the repeal also freed Ion Media from the responsibility of maintaining 'studios' in any manner, which for most stations were merely a low-cost office suite containing the station's public file, a telephone manned by a general manager with only the responsibility of responding to viewers and local pay-TV providers as a local representative of the network, along with a broadcast engineer who often is responsible for multiple Ion stations (the rule required two employees, an engineer and general manager, at minimum to staff a television station). Currently in a market with another Scripps station, that station's engineer also performs the same duties for the Ion station.
In the past, as a result before digital multicasting, there were a small number of stations (such as former affiliate WKFK-LD in Pascagoula, Mississippi) that maintained dual affiliations with both Ion and another smaller network, such as America One. In early 2006, it was announced that the i stations in Memphis, Tennessee (WPXX-TV), Rapid City, South Dakota (KKRA-LP) and Greenville, North Carolina (WEPX-TV, as well as its satellite WPXU-TV in Jacksonville, North Carolina) would add programming from MyNetworkTV in September 2006, causing preemptions of i programming during prime time due to the stations' programming commitments to carrying the MyNetworkTV schedule. This blow came after i lost some affiliates in New Mexico, New York and Illinois entirely (although the New York station, WWBI-LP in Plattsburgh, subsequently rejoined the network after a sale that resulted in the affiliation change fell through).
In late September 2009, a year after Ion Media Networks purchased WPXX and WEPX/WPXU from Flinn Broadcasting, those stations resumed carrying Ion Television full-time, having disaffiliated from MyNetworkTV as a result of the network terminating its existing affiliation agreements due to its conversion into a programming service. NBC affiliate WITN-TV took over the MyNetworkTV affiliation for the Greenville, North Carolina market, placing it on a digital subchannel; Memphis CW affiliate WLMT, meanwhile, picked up only WWE SmackDown in place of WPXX (that station would also add MyNetworkTV on a digital subchannel in a dual affiliation with MeTV from 2011, but eventually dropped the affiliation in 2016, leaving it on KPMF-LD until 2021, which is licensed to the nearby Jonesboro, Arkansas market but transmits from the same tower as WLMT does north of Memphis).