Hello again. Vacation time is over, but I kept holding off on posting here until there was some good news to report. No one wants to read about such dreary stuff as the St. Louis Cardinals shifting all of their baseball games away from OTA TV, or about the Research Channel going off the air because of University of Washington budget cuts.

This week, that good news arrived. First came word that those same Cardinals had agreed to move their radio contract back to KMOX, an AM station that most of the country can pick up after dark. That’s great for us lovers of free content and nighttime driving trips, but it’s not really FTA TV.

The big news is that BYU’s football team will leaving the Mountain West Conference next year and become independent. (Most of BYU’s other teams will join the West Coast Conference.) The reason we should care is that this gives BYU control over its broadcast rights for football, and indications are that most of the games will be live on BYU TV.

As discussed in stories in The Salt Lake Tribune and BYU’s Daily Universe, this means that BYU will use its successful football team to drive demand for BYU TV, which is already available on Dish Network, DirecTV, and FTA. And that goes along with what I’ve been preaching for years: If you want new viewers to convert to your cause, give them a reason to tune in. We’ll see whether BYU uses the opportunity to promote its other programming during the games.

At a minimum, this means more live major-college sports should be available a year from now on FTA. And we can all give thanks that at least one religious broadcaster understands what it takes to attract viewers.