KVOS-TV is licensed to Bellingham WA in the Seattle-Tacoma DMA, and we know that Kalil and Co. helped Newport Television find a buyer for the station. Now we know how much the buyer – OTA Broadcasting – is going to pay.
The price for the station will be $2.9M cash.
OTA is headed by Todd Lawyer and William Tolpegin. The company is getting its second TV signal in the Seattle area, pairing KVOS with Azteca America outlet KFFV. It also owns KTLN-TV in the San Francisco area.
There has been speculation that recent buyers of non-network affiliated and otherwise marginal broadcast television facilities in recent months are speculators thinking about the possibility of cashing in on incentive spectrum auctions in the television band, should such auctions be authorized by Congress and conducted by the FCC. And that may be the case, but OTA took pains to at the very least hedge its bet – the seller is required to turn KVOS over with all of its MVPD agreements in good shape, a clear indication that the buyer wants to maximize the value of the property on an operational basis.
RBR-TVBR observation: How fast and far have television prices been falling? Back in 2007, KVOS was packaged with KFTY-TV in the San Francisco market. Now both have been sold again separately, giving us benchmarks for comparison.
The 2007 deal for the pair was for a total of $26.6M.
KFTY sold this summer for $5.2M, and now we can add in $2.9M for KVOS. That’s a total of $8.1M, less than a third of the price agreed to about four years ago.
Ouch!
