Sunbeam Television owner Ed Ansin has announced the sale of WLVI-TV's broadcast signal in the FCC spectrum auction.
Sunbeam Television owner Ed Ansin has announced the sale of WLVI-TV's broadcast signal in the FCC spectrum auction.
Ansin told The Boston Herald that he was not at liberty to say what the final price the spectrum sold for, but it was "appreciably less" than the opening bid price set by the FCC. The FCC had valued WLVI's signal at up to $452 million for the station to go off-the-air. The FCC will not release any official auction results until the bidding ends in April.
In a process called the “Spectrum Auction”, the FCC is auctioning off the over-the-air rights, or spectrum, to mobile telephone and wireless communications companies. These airwaves will be used to create lightning fast 5G wireless internet and more bandwidth for mobile traffic.
WLVI is not going anywhere, however, and Ansin told the Herald that “there will be no change from the viewers’ perspective.”
Television stations had three options in the FCC auction. They could give up their broadcast license completely and go off the air; they could keep their broadcast license and move to a different channel allocation; or they could keep their broadcast license and channel share with another television station.
Once the sale is final, WLVI will start channel sharing with sister-station WHDH - that is keeping the seperate identity of WLVI 56, and its own programming, but sharing the same broadcast frequency as WHDH.
Ansin acquired WLVI, which is an affiliate of the CW network, for $113.7 million in 2006.
