America 1982-Chapter 325 - 22: The Era Is Calling Me_2
"I love you too, and because I love you, my advice is that it’s best not to come back to Warwick for the next six months unless it’s necessary. Otherwise, people might see you, get annoyed, and take you down an alley for a beating. You’ve disgraced both the Hawk Family and the Hope Mountain Community. Good heavens, you, coming from the whitest neighborhood, actually produced a program that flatters black people. I’ll give it a try—wait until the new TV comes on, then show it to them. Goodbye." After Colin finished rambling, he hung up the phone directly.
Seeing the other patrons at the bar looking at him at that moment, Colin, feeling annoyed, smacked his lips, and then spoke:
"Tommy just said he’s very sorry to have shown you all a piece of shit. He says the wrong tape was delivered by mistake. To apologize, he insisted that I treat everyone to a round of drinks as compensation for the blood pressure spike after watching that TV episode. And Wilson, you get to enjoy two rounds."
"I was still thinking it couldn’t be possible for Tommy to do such an egregious thing, but it turns out his workers sent the wrong tape." Wilson, enlightened by Colin’s explanation, nodded: "I should’ve thought of that. Your explanation has dispelled the suggestion I was about to voice."
"What suggestion?" Colin came over and sat down next to him to ask.
Wilson took a gulp of his drink: "To have you and Tommy take a paternity test at a major hospital. I was just thinking he was born with black skin, but you’ve been covering it up all along by painting white over Tommy’s body."
...
"My dear old dad must be extremely disappointed in me. He only said goodbye when he hung up, not even willing to say another word about Tommy or his beloved son." Tommy put down the phone and looked across at Earl Rash with a smile: "The people there can’t accept a storyline where a black man beats a white man."
Earl Rash, dressed in a bright blue leisure suit with a gold and white striped shirt underneath and not wearing a tie, instead sporting a thin gold chain, did not laugh along with Tommy. He was a black man who looked all the more vibrant and fashionable. Instead of echoing Tommy’s words, he picked up a stack of documents from the side and handed them to Tommy: 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢
"These are the details of the small A-class TV stations in cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia, Miami, New York, and Chicago that focus on the black community. They all aired our prepared pilot programs, and they’ve had a lot of viewers calling to ask when the official version will be aired. They’ll like it, but the only problem is, they think it’s better to have a JSA joint sales agreement rather than the LAM local marketing agreement we’re hoping for."
The two professional terms Earl Rash mentioned are two of the common forms of collaboration used by various television networks in the United States to expand their reach. Other types of agreements exist, but these two are most often chosen when TV stations affiliate with television networks.
A JSA joint sales agreement is basically where BT Television provides the program, and the other party is responsible for broadcasting. Revenue earned is then shared based on a negotiated ratio. This type of agreement is generally adhered to by television stations that rank within the top three in local viewership. It’s obvious that these A-class small stations now propose to collaborate with BT Television through joint sales because they see BT Television as a newcomer with money to produce its own shows yet inexperienced, and as old hands, they are clearly aiming high.
The LAM local marketing agreement, to put it simply, is where BT Television pays a fee to either full-time or part-time rent the entire TV station. The other party doesn’t need to do anything but follow BT Television’s provided schedule and broadcast the programs given. Whether the station can sell advertisements and make money or not is none of their concern. The TV station acts as a landlord, renting out the space like a house to BT Television. The only considerations are the amount of rent and the method, either part-time renting by the hour or full-time for the entire 24 hours a day.
Generally, small TV stations that don’t generate enough revenue on their own are willing to choose such agreements for partnering with TV networks, enabling them to have a stable income without doing anything all year round and even allowing them to cut down most of their staff to save expenses.
"An A-class TV station? Asking to collaborate with a JSA agreement?" Tommy took the documents handed over by Earl Rash, chuckled while flipping through them: "Earl, how do you deal with your black brethren who own those barely surviving small stations? You’re not a beggar coming to their doors; bro, you’re supposed to be the savior pulling them out of fire and water."
An A-class small TV station is actually a low-power broadcaster. Generally speaking, due to the limited power, such stations’ coverage is only about twenty-five to thirty kilometers, catering to a few community audiences.
And in big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, these small stations live in dire straits.
Because broadcast spectrum has become increasingly scarce in cities with numerous TV stations, this leads to the most common problem faced by small stations: if they can’t guarantee their programming can be broadcast twenty-four hours a day, then should they stop broadcasting, viewers may turn on the TV the next day looking for the channel, only to discover the frequency has been taken over by another TV station, and the one they were watching has disappeared.
