WTXF-TV
WTXF-TV is a television station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Owned and operated by the Fox network through its Fox Television Stations division, the station maintains studios on Market Street in Center City and a primary transmitter on the tower farm in Roxborough, with a secondary transmitter on South Mountain in Allentown.
Channel 29 is the longest continuously operated UHF station in Philadelphia, since May 16, 1965, as WIBF-TV from studios in the suburb of Jenkintown. WIBF-TV was owned by the Fox family alongside WIBF-FM 103.9. It was the first of three new commercial UHF outlets that year, broadcasting as an independent station focusing on community and sports programming. Taft Broadcasting purchased channel 29 in 1969 and renamed it WTAF-TV. Under Taft, the station slowly emerged as the leading independent station in the Philadelphia market with popular sports coverage, movies, and syndicated programs. The station was the broadcast outlet for the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team between 1971 and 1985 and for the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team from 1983 to 1992. The latter deal came after Taft Broadcasting purchased 47 percent of the team. In early 1986, WTAF-TV began producing a 10 p.m. local newscast. Later that year, it became affiliated with the new Fox television network.
Ownership of channel 29 shifted to TVX Broadcast Group in 1987 as part of its purchase of Taft's five large-market independent stations; the call sign was changed to WTXF-TV the next year. The deal left TVX highly leveraged and ultimately led to the station's sale in two parts between 1989 and 1991 to Paramount Pictures. Paramount nearly lost the station's Fox affiliation when Fox tried to buy another Philadelphia station in 1993. That purchase fell through, and Fox ultimately purchased WTXF-TV itself in a deal approved in 1995. Fox expanded the news department, first with a morning show—Good Day Philadelphia—and later with additional early evening and other newscasts.
History
In November 1952, the first construction permit for channel 29 in Philadelphia was received by WIP radio, then owned by Gimbels department store, as part of a wave of ultra high frequency station applications and assignments following a four-year-long freeze on permit awards. WIP returned the permit in May 1954, finding that building and operating the proposed station would be economically infeasible.WIBF-TV: Early years
In August 1962, William Fox, whose family owned WIBF-FM in Jenkintown as well as real estate interests there, received a construction permit from the Federal Communications Commission to build a new television station on channel 29. The new station would focus on local and regional programming, including news, local sports, and educational shows; it was the second commercial UHF station approved for the Philadelphia area after channel 17. The construction permit initially specified Jenkintown as the city of license, but this was changed to Philadelphia in 1963.In 1965, plans for channel 29 became more definite as the station announced several launch dates: first April 15, then May 1, though the station did not start broadcasting until May 16. It had contracted to air feature films and several British children's shows. Local programs included the teen show Discotheque, as well as local talk and conversation with former WCAU host Taylor Grant on the station's late newscast. Channel 29 also broadcast network shows that the city's ABC affiliate, WFIL-TV, opted not to air. Its attempts to pick up a similarly unaired NBC show were rejected because the station could not broadcast it in color.
The number of operating commercial UHF stations in the Philadelphia area would go from zero to three in 1965. After WIBF-TV, Kaiser Broadcasting debuted WKBS-TV on September 1, and channel 17 returned to the air after three years as WPHL-TV on September 17. To increase its coverage area, in 1966, WIBF-TV built a new transmitting tower in the Roxborough area, its transmitter having previously been located at the Fox family's Benson East apartments along with the studio. In 1967, WIBF-TV debuted Market, a six-hour stock market review program.
WTAF-TV: The Taft years
By late 1968, the Foxes disclosed that their broadcasting operations were operating with a deficit of more than $2 million. This would prove to be a major factor in the decision to sell WIBF-TV to Cincinnati-based Taft Broadcasting, a transaction which closed in May 1969 for $4.5 million, including assumption of debt, at the time the most spent for a UHF facility; an article in Variety declared of the purchase price, "For many it symbolizes the 'arrival' of UHF in the television scheme of things." Taft had room for a second UHF station—in addition to WNEP-TV in Scranton—because it had sold WKYT-TV in Lexington, Kentucky, the year before. However, Taft needed FCC waivers because the company already owned five stations in top-50 markets and because the signals of the two Pennsylvania stations overlapped.On October 20, 1969, the call letters changed from WIBF-TV—which had represented members of the Fox family—to WTAF-TV, reflecting the new ownership. The call sign change was part of a wider plan to improve every aspect of the station's operation, from programming to facilities. One early priority was to leave Jenkintown—where the sign on the building still read WIBF—for more centrally located and accessible studios. While Taft's idea of moving into 30th Street Station was made infeasible by the financial problems of owner Penn Central, the station relocated to its present facilities at 4th and Market streets in December 1972.
Taft also expanded channel 29's local sports coverage. In 1971, channel 29 began telecasting road games of the Philadelphia Flyers of the NHL. The station also telecast the Philadelphia 76ers of the NBA, Philadelphia Freedoms of World TeamTennis, Philadelphia Wings lacrosse, and road games of the Philadelphia Bell of the short-lived World Football League in 1975. On August 29, 1975, the Bell were playing a televised contest against the Southern California Sun in Anaheim. The game began late at night because of the time difference, and WTAF-TV viewers never got to see the end of the 58-39 Sun victory, as the station signed off before the game was completed.
WTAF-TV continued to lose money in its first years under Taft, but it slowly improved its ratings and financial position over the decade. In the second half of the 1970s, WTAF-TV emerged as Philadelphia's highest-rated independent station after having previously trailed WPHL and WKBS. Flyers coverage and the strength of the station's nightly movies were cited as particular bright spots in the program lineup. It was profitable in each year between 1975 and 1978.
Taft and the Phillies
In 1981, Taft Broadcasting acquired a 47-percent stake in the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team as part of a group headed by team executive Bill Giles. The Phillies had been broadcast on WPHL-TV since 1971; that station's owner, the Providence Journal Company, had increased its rights fees for 1979 just so the team could sign free agent Pete Rose. Immediately, it was announced that Phillies games would move to channel 29 beginning in 1984, after the existing WPHL-TV contract ended, as part of a new nine-year, $30 million deal ; this was brought forward a year to 1983 after Taft negotiated a buyout of channel 17's final year on the contract. For Taft, buying a large share of the Phillies and their television rights was as much about programming WTAF-TV as it was a business move: Taft executives pointed out that baseball would provide more hours of content than the entire run of M*A*S*H, a popular and long-running series which channel 29 aired in syndication.The Philadelphia independent market contracted in 1983 when WKBS-TV went off the air, a victim of corporate infighting amid the dissolution of Field Communications. However, most of channel 48's former program inventory was purchased by WPHL-TV. Two years later, a third independent was added back to the Philadelphia lineup with the sale of WWSG-TV to Milton Grant and its relaunch as WGBS-TV. The Flyers moved to channel 57 after 15 seasons on channel 29, citing in part the emphasis the station had placed on promoting and broadcasting the Phillies.
Fox, TVX, and WTXF
On October 9, 1986, WTAF-TV became a charter affiliate of the fledgling Fox television network, which initially only offered late-night and weekend prime time programming. It had beaten out WPHL-TV for the affiliation.The arrival of Fox to channel 29—announced in early August—was overshadowed later that month when Taft announced it was likely to put its five independent stations up for sale to pay down the large debt its 1985 purchase of Gulf Broadcast Group had generated, fend off activist investors such as Robert Bass, and concentrate on its portfolio of network affiliates. An appraisal estimated that WTAF-TV alone could sell for $175 million and the five stations together for $690 million.
The stations fetched far less than that when TVX Broadcast Group of Norfolk, Virginia, paid $240 million for the package. Taft lost between $45 and $50 million. Weeks later, Taft exited its stake in the Phillies by selling the 47.5 percent of the club to its other owners for $24.1 million.
TVX officially closed on the deal on April 9, 1987. While TVX applied for new WTXF-TV call letters at that time as a condition of the sale because of the close association of WTAF-TV with Taft, the call sign did not change until June 1, 1988.
The Taft stations purchase gave TVX five major-market stations, though most were doing poorly, with the chief exception of channel 29. It left TVX highly leveraged and highly vulnerable. TVX's bankers, Salomon Brothers, provided the financing for the acquisition and in return held more than 60 percent of the company. The company was to pay Salomon Brothers $200 million on January 1, 1988, and missed the first payment deadline, having been unable to lure investors to its junk bonds even before the Black Monday stock market crash. While TVX recapitalized by the end of 1988, Salomon Brothers reached an agreement in principle in January 1989 for Paramount Pictures to acquire options to purchase the investment firm's majority stake. This deal was replaced in September with an outright purchase of 79 percent of TVX for $110 million. In 1991, Paramount acquired the remainder of TVX, forming the Paramount Stations Group.
The increasing priority and quantity of Fox network programming, as well as pressure from the network as it prepared to expand to seven-night-a-week service, led to the end of the station's association with the Phillies. In 1991, the station proposed a joint deal with KYW-TV to air the team's broadcast games beginning in 1993. However, the Phillies opted to return to WPHL-TV, which had the ability to broadcast more games than WTXF-TV.