Super Bowl Update

The owner of the Courier & Press and Gleaner (as well as Indianapolis ABC affiliate WRTV) has been introducing several new apps lately, most of which cost money.  The folks at Scripps believe folks will pay whatever price they charge for them, despite completely free apps being available elsewhere. [TVNewsCheck]

Karl Rove and Dick Morris were dead wrong in their prognostications about the '12 election (Rove blew his stack when Fox called Ohio for President Obama and Morris boldly predicted a Romney "landslide") , and as a result they've lost their places on Fox News Channel, at least for now.  [New York]

On the heels of Time Warner Cable's boss saying that, to save money, he'd quit carrying networks that don't bring in a lot of viewers, CBS top dog Les Moonves says that the popular nets should cost more, even joking at one point that the CBS network should cost cable operators $7 per month per subscriber. (It's well under $1 now.) [Deadline New York]

Right This Minute, the video joint venture show produced by Cox Media, Raycom and Scripps, will begin its second season on Sept. 10 with a handful of new stations added to those which carried it last year.

Six of the seven new stations carrying the program are Scripps-owned stations, including WRTV 6 in Indianapolis and the other stations the company purchased from McGraw-Hill last year.

The program airs locally each weekday on 14Xtra (WFIE 14.2 / 5 and 8 p.m.), The Heartland's CW (KFVS 12.2, WQWQ 9 and WQTV 24 / 4 and 4:30 p.m.) and This TV Louisville (WAVE 3.2 / 3 and 3:30 a.m.).

“We’re still endeavoring to sell the show beyond our partner markets,” says Phil Alvidrez, general manager of MagicDust Television, which partners with Cox, Raycom and Scripps to produce RTM. “But Scripps is totally on board. We are in all their markets. And we’re in half of the Raycom and Cox markets.”

In its original form, RTM was a one-hour program in which they showed clips and then talked about them into two half-hours where they track down videos before they go viral, like a recent clip of a woman in her military uniform breastfeeding her baby.

“You see a pop in the ratings with a great video that people haven’t seen in a lot of places,” says Lisa Hudson, who is RTM’s co-executive producer with Dennis O’Neill. “The website gets a lot more traffic and our name gets out there. People talk about us more.”

The show is moving from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism to a bigger production facility with a more intimate set. Instead of looking like a newsroom as before, the set now looks like a coffee shop, where the hosts sit on barstools around a tall table while watching videos on a computer.

Comcast and Scripps Networks Interactive (SNI) have reached a long-term agreement to expand their relationship in bringing Scripps’ popular television networks and their award-winning shows to Comcast’s Xfinity TV customers throughout the U.S. on more devices than ever before.  The multi-year arrangement covers distribution via Comcast’s linear and on-demand platforms and makes Scripps’ content available to Xfinity TV customers through online, mobile, and other devices, as well as via Scripps’ sites and services.

SNI’s lifestyle networks include HGTV, DIY Network, Food Network, Cooking Channel, Travel Channel and Great American Country, with highly rated shows such as House Hunters, Chopped  and Hotel Impossible.

“This agreement with Scripps Networks underscores our commitment to TV Everywhere and our desire to use the latest technologies and rapid pace of innovation to deliver the best content to Xfinity TV customers wherever and whenever they want to watch it,” said Gregory Rigdon, executive vice president of content acquisition at Comcast.

With the growing consumer use of time-shifted and on-demand viewing, the agreement provides for increased distribution of Scripps’ content through Comcast’s video-on-demand services. Additionally, the new contract includes the use of Comcast’s advanced advertising platforms, such as dynamic ad insertion, to support programmers’ efforts to monetize their content both during the Nielsen measurement window and thereafter.

“This agreement benefits our viewers and Comcast customers, making available on multiple platforms – both in home and out of home – our lifestyle programming that viewers are so passionate about,” said Henry Ahn, executive vice president of distribution strategy at SNI.

In the Tri-State area, Comcast serves cable customers in Tell City and Cannelton, Ind., as well as much of Muhlenberg County, Ky.