2 Wisconsin low-power TV stations are adding politics during the RNC
The operator of clusters of lowpower television stations in Milwaukee and Madison is launching a new politics-centric channel in Milwaukee in time for this summer’s Republican National Convention.
Kansas City, Missouri-based Roseland Communication said Tuesday it plans to launch Purple TV, described as an “informational political channel,” in June on its cluster of Milwaukee channels.
Details on what kind of political content would air on the new channel were slim. According to Purple TV’s website, “the channel will focus on politics and will have a centrist and pro-compromise outlook. It will run from the Republican Convention in July through the election in November.”
The website also says it will be added on Roseland’s cluster of channels in Madison later this summer.
Roseland says it operates 10 lowpower TV station clusters in small and midsize markets around the country. Among the programming services the company leases its subchannels to is One America News Network (OANN), a hard-conservative news and opinion channel that it airs on stations in Bismarck, North Dakota, and Tyler, Texas.
According to the website, Purple TV is run by Matthew Davidge, who also is CEO of Roseland Communication.
The news came a couple weeks after Roseland changed the call letters and channel number of its low-power cluster in Milwaukee from WPVS, airing on Channel 29, to WWMW, now found over the air on Channel 16. Roseland also changed its Madison-area cluster, licensed to Verona, to WMWI, also broadcasting on Channel 16.
Low-power stations have licenses that allow them to broadcast over the air using a more limited transmitter signal than full-power stations; typically, they lease their stations’ bandwidth to a variety of programming outlets.
Southeast Wisconsin has more than a half-dozen low-power TV outlets, though their signals make their reach limited, depending on a viewer’s antenna. Only a handful are also carried on local cable or satellite services.
Many low-power stations, like their full-power counterparts, slice their digital signals into a number of subchannels. WWMW currently has five channels in all airing in Milwaukee: 16.1, airing the Nostalgia Network; 16.2, SportStak; 16.3, an infomercial station; 16.4, Jewelry TV, a shopping channel; and 16.5, SonLife, a Christian channel.