On Monday, Ring of Honor announced a TV deal, but not with a provider you may immediately be familiar with.
Starting Wednesday, December 2nd, ROH’s flagship show will air at midnight on Comet TV, a 24/7 science fiction network that is owned by Sinclair Broadcasting Group, ROH’s parent company. The press release sent touts that the network is available in over 60% of the country and in over 65 million homes as of October 31st.
Essentially, the deal is an extension of the current Sinclair deal, with many of the Sinclair stations now adding a Wednesday night at midnight replay, as well adding distribution in a number of new markets, most notably New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia San Francisco and Houston, where ROH doesn’t have distribution.
The key new stations will be KDOC-TV 32 in Los Angeles, KCNS-39 in San Francisco, WZME-42 in the Bridgeport, CT, market, WCCT-20 in Hartford, CT, KIKU-19 in Honolulu, WOCH-49 in Chicago, WTTV-48 in Indianapolis, WMFP-18 in Lawrence, MA, KVMY-2 in Las Vegas, and KUBE-41 in Houston.
ROH’s 26-week deal with Destination America expires in December, and their final episode on D.A. will be on Wednesday, November 25th. The removal of ROH from the 8 PM EST primetime slot as a lead-in to TNA Impact several months ago was not considered a good sign.
Reports dating back to August were that is was unlikely ROH would be renewed. Jane Latman, who took over from Marc Etkind as the General Manager of the station about six weeks ago, had said she was going to be reviewing all programming, and as of a few weeks ago, that was the information the company had received.
