Some "Rants" Details

In what seems to be the biggest promotional campaign for a radio and/or TV show in some time, the move to promote FSN Ohio and WKNR/850's upcoming "Cleveland Rants" (non-official) Indians postgame radio/TV simulcast continues.

WKNR has been promoting the show incessantly in the past few days, and the season hasn't even started yet! The hosts - FSN Ohio's Les Levine and WKNR's Neil Bender - appeared with the radio station's Greg Brinda AND Kenny Roda today.

We heard part of the duo's appearance on Roda's show. Levine says that though the show is intended to be an "honest, objective" look at the team from a non-team-influenced perspective, it may some days resemble the name "Cleveland Raves" if the team is doing well. In other words, they're not just there to gripe about what the team does wrong.

Levine notes that FSN Ohio's part of the show will last about an hour each night/day, give or take a few minutes depending on the end time of the game in question. After FSN Ohio turns off the cameras, Bender will continue solo on WKNR for more.

It turns out there may only be about 145 "Rants" shows on FSN Ohio out of 162 regular season games...we assume that such things as conflicts with existing sports events (Cavs, college basketball/football, etc.) on the cable network will preempt 17 appearances on TV.

And though our radio hit some electrical noise at about the time Levine said it, we believe we heard that a studio is indeed being built for the show.

That's significant, because we'd then expect Levine's existing Adelphia cable show "More Sports and Les Levine" to move to FSN Ohio - when Adelphia closes up shop later this summer as part of the Time Warner deal. In this joint venture, it seems Levine is FSN Ohio's representative.

Levine did mention on Roda's show that his "More Sports..." won't be affected by this new venture, as far as being taken off the air...but we'd put some money down on it moving to FSN Ohio, and the network's new studios, when Adelphia becomes Time Warner locally...