Digital Antenna TV Station List - Memphis, TN

This post will be updated soon after changes occur. Don't just go by the date of the post. I forget to republish it sometimes. Enjoy.

Channel	Name	Description	Picture
3.1	WREG-TV	CBS	16x9
3.2	NC3A-DT	News/Weather 24/ 7	4x3
3.3	Antenna	Old series & movies	4x3
5.1	WMC-NBC	NBC	16x9
5.2	Bounce	Black-oriented movies etc.	4x3
5.3	THIS TV	Old series & movies	4x3
6.0	WPGF-LP	Low Power analog; WMPS-FM 87.7; very weak	4x3
10.1	WKNO HD	PBS	16x9
10.2	WKNO SD	PBS Reruns & World TV	4x3
13.1	WHBQ DT	Fox	16x9
13.2	WHBQ DT2	Movies! All movies, no TV series	16x9
15.0	W15CH	Low power analog simulcast of 17.1; very weak	4x3
17.1	WPGF-LD	Spanish variety; TeLe-Romántica; Low power Digital	4x3
23.1	WTWV DT	Christian Worldview Broadcasting Corp.	4x3
23.2	WTWV DT2	ACME Classics: old series & movies	4x3
24.1	WPTY-DT	ABC	16x9
30.1	WLMT-DT	CW	16x9
30.2	Me-TV	Old series	4x3
33.1	WFBI-LD	Old cartoons, NASA TV; Low power Digital; weak	4x3
40.1	TBN	Christian - Trinity Broadcasting Network	4x3
40.2	Church	Christian	4x3
40.3	JCTV	Christian music	4x3
40.4	Enlace	Christian - Spanish	4x3
40.5	SOAC	Christian - Smile of a Child	4x3
42.1	W50EA-EN	Christian - 3 Angels Broadcasting Network	4x3
42.2	3ABN-PR	Christian - 3ABN Proclaim	4x3
42.3	3ABN-DD	Christian - Dare to Dream Network	4x3
42.4	3ABN-ES	Christian - 3ABN Latino (Spanish)	4x3
42.5	3ABN-RD	Christian - (audio only)	None
42.6	3ABN-RL	3ABN Latino Radio (Spanish audio)	None
42.7	Radio74	Christian - (audio only)	None
46.1	W46EF-D	Simulcast of 33.1; low power digital; weak	4x3
48.1	VTN	Christian – KVTJ Jonesboro, AR; very weak signal	4x3
50.1	ION	WPXX - More recent series & movies	16x9
50.2	qubo	Kids	4x3
50.3	IONLife	Home, health, food, exercise	4x3
50.4	ShopTV	Paid programming & some ION Life shows	4x3
59.1	WDNM-LD	Word of God Fellowship; Low power Digital; weak	4x3

For a printable list, click here or here.  For more detailed lists, click here or here.

I've also found the following two TV listings websites to be the best and most customizable to replace cable's program guide offerings.  Be sure to sign up for a free account to personalize the channels you want in your guide.

Zap2it (Wikipedia article), which can link to Tivo; and

TitanTV, which may be the most usable with a Personal Video Recorder like a PC-compatible TV tuner like Hauppage with its own software.

Also be sure to check the extent your HDTV's implement the required Electronic Program Guide, which comes across more fully over-the-air than on cable's no-box analog NTSC and digital QAM offerings.  Try the Display and other buttons on your HDTV's controls, and you will likely find a description of the current program on the channel tuned in at that moment.

Here are some helpful links to the detailed schedules, with individual program descriptions, of some of the stations listed above:

ABC
ACME Classics
Antenna TV
Bounce TV
CBS
CW
Fox
ION
Me-TV
Movies!
NASA TV
NBC
TeLe-Romántica
This TV
WKNO HD & SD

Some of the network sites have full episodes up for streaming to your PC, tablet, or mobile device!  Including PBS!

UPDATE: Here's some advice from Channel 5's engineer on "Choosing and placing your antenna."

UPDATE: The reports were true: the Movies! network starts on 13.2 at 8:00am on Monday, May 27, 2013, Memorial Day.  The Wikipedia entry.  Hopefully, most (modern movies and TV) if not all of the programming will be in anamorphic widescreen, as has been reported.  From the local affiliate announcement:

"Movies!" offers 24-hours/day, full feature, wide-screen, films in the original format and run times, edited for language and inappropriate images. Movies! airs many timeless classics, and some films not seen on broadcast TV to date and are presented with limited commercial breaks.

Excessive Branding On Your Television Screen

This is a post of a letter I wrote to a local TV affiliate distracting overuse of station ID "bugs" on screen.  Then I decided to forward it to all the local stations and post it here to reach the networks who don't provide email addresses for feedback but want you to stuff yourself into their dreadful web forms.  The letter is below:

This is a forward of an email I realized conveyed a message more people in the industry need to hear: a little pushback on growing screen clutter.  I tried to use the appropriate email addresses at each entity.  If I failed, it’s because you don’t reveal one on your website.  Please forward internally to the persons in decision-making positions in your entity.

From: Stephen Tapp
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2013 1:35 PM
To: programming@cw30memphis.com
Subject: Web Inquiry

Would it be possible to talk you all into showing your bug only during required station ID times?

I emailed WREG-TV about their multicolored double bug (network+station) being on all the time on their subchannel 3.3, AntennaTV (except commercials, of course); and I believe they responded, because now the double bug does not distract the eye throughout entire programs or any more than the FCC requires, although it could be gray like yours.

However, as the attached screen cap shows, even YOUR double bug can interfere with enjoyment of your programming.  I have been a force here and nationwide to some small degree (based on hits and my position in Google’s search engine and probably others), in renewing the primacy of broadcast stations, as evidenced by the following blog posts of mine:

Digital Antenna TV Station List - Memphis, TN

I Cancelled All Comcast TV Service!

I have even driven traffic to your station in the past:

MeTV Replaces RTV (Retro) in Memphis

I am asking that you reduce the presence of your network/station ID to the minimum times required by the FCC or just a bit longer, although I think there is too much paranoia over piracy of decades-old programming being broadcast in 480i, which in some part drives the constant branding that has spread in recent years.  If revision of your agreement with Me-TV is required, I hope you will ask for reduced bug time requirements instead of the distracting excessive branding that we are all supposed to accept as loved by the computer generation: a development that has gone so far that we now have sprites dancing all over the screen about things other than the program being shown that we are supposed to be able to follow, be loyal to, and proselytize for to our friends and on social media.  I’d like to point out that at the moment I am writing, you are showing People’s Court on your main channel 30.1 without a constant station ID bug.



Thank you for your attention to this important matter.  I realize now that I would like to make this same case to all the other local stations and to the national networks, so I am likely to forward this email to them and make a blog post out of it as well.

Best wishes,
Stephen Kyle Tapp

The Lost Tomb of Jesus

UPDATE: Bumped up to Easter 2013 from my original post around Easter 2007.

The Discovery Channel premiered this documentary offering evidence that a first-century tomb found in Jerusalem contained the remains of Jesus of Nazareth and members of his family. From the show site (now defunct):

Has the tomb of Jesus Christ been found? 

Since the 1970s, hundreds of tombs and thousands of ossuaries (limestone bone boxes) have been discovered in the Jerusalem area. These ossuaries served as coffins in first-century Jerusalem.

One of these tombs was found to contain ten ossuaries. Six of the ossuaries in this tomb have inscriptions on them. As it turns out, every inscription in this particular tomb relates to the Gospels.

In the feature documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus a case is made that the 2,000-year-old "Tomb of the Ten Ossuaries" belonged to the family of Jesus of Nazareth.

All leading epigraphers agree about the inscriptions. All archaeologists confirm the nature of the find. It comes down to a matter of statistics. A statistical study commissioned by the broadcasters (Discovery Channel/Vision Canada/C4 UK) concludes that the probability factor is in the order of 600 to 1 that an equally "surprising" cluster of names would arise purely by chance under given assumptions. The film also documents DNA extraction from human residue found in two of the ossuaries and reveals new evidence that throws light on Jesus' relationship with Mary Magdalene.

I enjoyed watching this documentary. Here's the program's official site. Interesting stuff....

UPDATE: This documentary caused a lot of criticism (see the Wikipedia article) because it challenged belief in the Resurrection as proof of Jesus' supernatural divinity and of eternal life in general that are really the primary reasons people are Christians. From a dispassionate report in TV Week, "Is Discovery Burying 'Lost Tomb'? Net Pulls Repeat, Declines to Tout Ratings":

Discovery Channel's controversial James Cameron-produced documentary "The Lost Tomb of Jesus" drew the largest audience for the network in more than a year on Sunday night, but the network has taken several recent steps to downplay the project.

 

Departing from normal procedures, the cable network didn't tout its big ratings win. The network also scheduled a last-minute special that harshly criticized its own documentary, has yanked a planned repeat of "Tomb" and has not put the documentary on its video-on-demand server.

Well, I hunted down a place for you to watch this documentary on YouTube. Check it out.

Free Angry Birds on Facebook!

Move Google Reader RSS Feeds to Internet Explorer & Windows Live Mail

I looked around for a replacement RSS newsreader after Google announced it is discontinuing Google Reader; but the most touted candidate, Feedly, does not support Internet Explorer.

So I remembered the Feeds feature in IE, including the new IE10 now available for Windows 7 (highly favorable PCMag review), which you can download here, and decided to try using that.  I also use Windows Live Mail, which also uses Microsoft's Feeds feature, integrated with IE, so that was an incentive.

Google now wants you to use their overall save-your-data facility, Google Takeout, to export your Reader feeds, so you have to start there.  You can go to the base link or straight to the Reader export selection.  Click the CREATE ARCHIVE button and then download the archive from the resulting page and unzip it.  Look in the Reader subfolder and you will see 8 files, the most important of which is subscriptions.xml, which will do for the .opml file needed to import into Internet Explorer.

Now open Internet Explorer, click the Favorites/Feeds/History star and the down arrow next to Add to favorites and select Import and export...  Make sure the Import from a file radio button is selected, and click Next.  Check Feeds and click Next.  Navigate with the Browse button to the subscriptions.xml you extracted, select the file, and click Open.  In the next box, you will see the base folder Feeds selected.  Click the Import button and then Finish in the success box that follows.

Now when you click the Favorites star and the Feeds tab, you will see your old Google Reader feeds ready for use in Internet Explorer AND Windows Live Mail.  You can control these feeds from both IE and WLM by right-clicking on one of the feeds in the feed view and going from there, especially as to their behavior inside each separate app.

Not only are elaborate instructions about how to do every little thing with your feeds and the posts in them beyond the scope of this blog post, but I am still learning details myself! 

I will keep my eye peeled for other replacement newsreaders that may fill the void as Google Reader exits the field, but for now this will help some of you out.  If you leave Windows Live Mail running most of the time for new incoming email, you will like having your feeds update without having to pull or leave Google Reader up too.

Enjoy!

Zatoichi TV Series Season 1 (playlist)

This is one of the best TV series ever made.  If you like samurai-era yakuza-themed stuff and can read subtitles, this will provide you with hours and hours of entertainment.  And there are more seasons of it on YouTube.

Memphis-Related Record Labels

I found this site a while ago.  It is just a gold mine of information and reminiscences for Memphis music industry people and hard-core fans.  Click here.

$5 Cover: Full Episodes

To me, this is the best thing Craig Brewer has ever done; but then, I live in Memphis and know some of these youngsters.  If Craig were older and had captured the goings-on in my day, it would have been even better, probably better than Bill Eggleston's footage in Stranded in Canton.

Anyway, this will get you started on the 15-episode mini-series done for MTV called $5 Cover that portrays the young midtown Memphis hipster music scene and does that well.  It opens with movie actress and recording artist Amy LaVere (an extremely pretty yet unassuming young lady with a baby doll voice) playing bass in her panties.  What more do you need to know?

Alan Watts full TV series (playlist)

I am trying to return to blogging more instead of micro-blogging on Facebook and Twitter, because I can write long-form and because my posts have more staying power on here through search engines.

With that preface, I have been wanting to share a TV series from 1959 and 1960 that used to show on PBS but now shows constantly on YouTube.  It was done by the best presenter of Eastern religions in the English language, Alan Watts.  Absorb it, and you will know all you need to know to be ready to experience your own enlightenment.

"Hang" Music

An old friend in the movie theater business posted this video on Facebook. It is one of the most beautiful, entrancing things I've ever heard. The instruments are "hang" drums, although their inventors don't want you to call them drums, even though they're more like traditional Caribbean steel "drums" than anything I know of. Just listen up first. I'll post a link after the video if you want to learn more.



The "Hang (instrument)" entry in Wikipedia.

These guys' website with lots more music videos!