Sometimes a business can benefit from obscurity. An 8-year-old local television station is a good example.

When WKCF-TV signed on in Orlando in 1988, its assigned channel was 68. Research shows the higher a station's channel number, the lower the chances viewers will sample it - which wasn't bad in WKCF's case. Mark Lass, general manager of the station, calls the programs the independent station could afford to put on the air during its earliest day dogs. He quickly names Perfect Strangers and a quickly forgotten series called Carson Comedies when asked for examples.

Add to the bad shows/high channel equation the fact that hardly any area cable television systems carried the station in those days, and the phrase "nobody's watching" takes on new meaning.

"We had no cable position, no numbers (ratings)" says Lass, 33, who came here in 1991 from the newspaper division of parent company New Jersey Press Inc.

Five months earlier, the station had traded channel assignments with the Brevard Community College TV station, and in doing so took on the name it's commonly called today: TV 18. It also has negotiated lower spots on individual cable system lineups over the past three years, moves that Lass says also added viewers.

Those tactics didn't fully solve the problem.

"We didn't have anything big to sell," Lass says. "It's fortunate we had good salespeople who knew how to sell."

A big break, he says, came when Nielsen Media Research installed meters in Orlando that automatically record viewers' channel choices. "Nielsen families" here previously had kept special diaries in which they...