In Tuesday's story that NBC Universal would acquire Oxygen Media for $925 million, the conglom announced that it would partly fund the purchase by selling two stations: A Telemundo affiliate in Puerto Rico, and Los Angeles independent Spanish outlet KWHY.
NBC has run three TV stations in Los Angeles -- KNBC, KVEA and KWHY -- for several years, getting waivers to do so on a temporary basis (as companies are still allowed to run a max of 2 stations in a market). Ultimately, NBC might have had to divest of KWHY anyway, so this decision made a lot of sense.
So what happens to KWHY? One possibility: Azteca America, which is about to lose its L.A. affiliate (as KAZA-Channel 54 dumps the Spanish-language network at the end of the year) may see the station as crucial to stay in the game. Or, Disney could go after it, realizing that it's the only major TV station group in L.A. without a duopoly.
I do think it's safe to say that the new owners won't try to reinstate KWHY's old business news format. Channel 22 aired a business news format during the day from 1966 to 2001, when it moved over to Channel 57 (and then disappeared altogether). In an age of cable business news and the internet, it no longer made sense; KWHY has been 24/7 Spanish since then.
In the early 1980s, KWHY also shut off in the evening in order to switch over to the subscription TV service SelecTV. Yeah, don't think that's coming back either.
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