WPWR-TV
WPWR-TV, branded Fox Chicago Plus, is a television station licensed to Gary, Indiana, United States. It is one of two commercial television stations in the Chicago market to be licensed in Indiana. WPWR-TV is owned by Fox Television Stations alongside WFLD, an owned-and-operated station of the Fox network; the stations share studios on North Michigan Avenue in the Chicago Loop and transmitter facilities atop the Willis Tower. The station carries programming from Fox's secondary programming service, MyNetworkTV, in late night.
WPWR-TV sold its spectrum space in the Federal Communications Commission 's incentive auction, and began channel-sharing with WFLD on June 11, 2018.
History
As an independent station (1982–1995)
Early years with WBBS-TV
The station first signed on the air on April 4, 1982, as a shared station operation broadcasting on UHF channel 60, split between English-language WPWR-TV and Spanish-language WBBS-TV. The shared station was the result of a shared-time agreement between two of the three applicants vying for the channel: HATCO-60—owned by Chicago Hispanic marketing agency owner Marcelino Miyares alongside other partners and the members of a competing applicant, Aurora-Chicago Telecasters—and Metrowest Corporation—owned by Fred Eychaner, which would later become Newsweb Corporation. Both stations operated as independents in their respective languages. WPWR-TV's city of license was Aurora, while WBBS-TV was licensed to West Chicago; each of them operated from the same transmitter on the Sears Tower.A large percentage of WPWR's programming schedule was occupied by SportsVision, a new pay television service which Eychaner had developed through a deal with Chicago White Sox co-owners Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn. To receive the service, viewers had to rent a set-top converter and pay a monthly fee in order to view SportsVision's event telecasts, involving the Chicago sports teams. However, SportsVision was not a success and transitioned into a cable channel in January 1983, eventually evolving into SportsChannel Chicago.
With SportsVision removed from its schedule, Eychaner began acquiring public domain movies to air on weekends and a few shows that were still owned by fellow independent station WSNS-TV, which began carrying the ONTV subscription entertainment service on a full-time basis in the fall of 1982. These programs ran weekdays from 6 to 8 a.m. and from 5 to 7 p.m., as well as from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekends; public domain movies also ran during the overnight hours when WBBS signed off for the night. WPWR also chose to compete with rival independent WCIU-TV 's locally produced business news service, Stock Market Observer, by running national business programming from the Financial News Network each weekday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The FNN simulcast was dropped in January 1984, at which time the station added several classic sitcoms from the early to mid-1950s and older cartoons to its schedule. In 1984, more recognizable classic sitcoms and newer barter cartoons were mixed into the schedule.
Meanwhile, HATCO-60's WBBS-TV programmed channel 60 daily from 7 p.m. to 2:30 a.m., as the second television station for Chicago's Hispanic community. WBBS-TV programming included telenovelas and movies, as well as locally produced shows, such as the popular music video program Imagen, hosted by local Spanish-language television personality Rey Mena and Vivianne Plazas. One of the notable events for WBBS occurred in 1983, when the station introduced the Latin teen pop group Menudo to Chicago's Latino community.
Move to channel 50
Eychaner showed an interest quickly in acquiring another license to make WPWR a full-time station. In Gary, Indiana, Great Lakes Broadcasting—formerly known as GWWX-TV—had held a construction permit since 1981 to build WDAI, a television station on channel 56. When it applied for the station in 1979, GWWX-TV had proposed part-time subscription television operation, as well as news and information for the African American community. A technical problem, however, impeded a key part of GWWX's plans. GWWX was the second channel 56 permitholder to seek approval to place the station on the Sears Tower. The first one was Greater Media Television, which had held the construction permit for WGMI and was denied in its plan to locate the facility there in 1968 because the Sears Tower site did not meet spacing requirements to two allocations in southeast Wisconsin: channel 49 at Racine and channel 55 at Kenosha. Additionally, channels 56 and 60 could not co-exist at the same site per channel spacing rules. As such, GWWX amended its application to specify a tower in Park Forest, Illinois, enabling the FCC to grant the application in November 1981.By 1984, WDAI was still unbuilt; the other allocation to Gary, noncommercial channel 50, was also silent. Public outlet WCAE had folded in 1983 because the Lake Central School Corporation could no longer support the station. The license had been transferred to Northwest Indiana Public Broadcasting, which was attempting to raise funds to rebuild channel 50 from a newer, more centrally located facility in the region. Eychaner saw an opportunity: he bought a majority stake in Great Lakes and its WDAI construction permit and then paid Northwest Indiana Public Broadcasting $684,000 to join it in a petition to switch the statuses of channel 50 and 56 and then assign the WDAI permit to channel 50—enabling it to be built on the Sears Tower—and WCAE to the newly noncommercial channel 56. The FCC approved such swaps among channels in the same band, as was the case with the two UHF stations, in March 1986, and in August, the commission issued final orders switching the commercial and noncommercial allocations for Gary. The money Northwest Indiana Public Broadcasting received from Metrowest enabled it to land a federal grant to build out its facility, which returned to the air November 15, 1987, as WYIN.
The move may have been initially planned to allow both WPWR and WBBS to go full-time on their own channels. However, market conditions intervened during this time that would force WBBS-TV off the air. In the spring of 1985, WSNS announced it would exit subscription television and become a full-time affiliate of the Spanish International Network. WCIU, the previous SIN outlet in Chicago, then took an affiliation with the NetSpan network. WBBS-TV owner Miyares, realizing that the loss of the NetSpan affiliation would be crippling for his station, reduced WBBS' programming schedule to 8 p.m. to its late-night sign-off on weekend evenings late that year, selling the rest of the weekday time periods that his station had occupied to Eychaner, allowing WPWR to broadcast full-time on weekdays. WBBS shut down for good in early 1986; Miyares sold WBBS' remaining airtime on the channel to Eychaner, turning WPWR into a 24-hour operation, until Eychaner's purchase of the WBBS-TV license for $11 million closed on August 22, 1986, when WPWR-TV went full-time.
The following year, only able to own one station, Eychaner sold the channel 60 license to Home Shopping Network for $25 million, in order to move WPWR-TV's programming and call sign to UHF channel 50. When the frequency swap occurred on January 18, 1987, WPWR moved to channel 50, with a rerun of the anthology series Night Gallery as the first program it aired on its new frequency; the now HSN-owned channel 60 simultaneously had its call letters changed to WEHS.
As time went on, WPWR began acquiring many cartoons, more recent off-network sitcoms, drama series, movies and first-run syndicated shows. Within a year of starting full-time operation on channel 50, WPWR had firmly established itself as the third independent station in Chicago, behind WGN-TV and future sister station WFLD. Although WFLD had become a charter owned-and-operated station of Fox in October 1986, that network would not air a full week's worth of programming until September 1993, so for all intents and purposes it was still programmed as an independent. In late August 1994, the station began carrying the Spelling Premiere Network syndication service, which featured a "Spelling Success" run of past series from the Spelling production portfolio.
UPN affiliation (1995–2006)
On November 10, 1993, WPWR-TV signed an affiliation agreement with Chris-Craft/United Television, to become a charter affiliate of the United Paramount Network ; WPWR competed with WGN-TV—which initially turned down an affiliation with The WB, a joint venture between Time Warner and WGN parent Tribune Broadcasting that debuted the week before UPN launched—for the affiliation. WGN, meanwhile, reversed course and signed an affiliation agreement with The WB one month later on December 3.WPWR-TV formally affiliated with UPN when the network launched on January 16, 1995. As WPWR was never owned by either of UPN's parent companies, Chris-Craft Industries or Viacom, it was the largest UPN station that was not owned by the network.
On June 27, 2002, Newsweb Corporation sold WPWR to Fox Television Stations for $425 million—a handsome return on Eychaner's original investment from 20 years earlier. The sale closed on August 21, 2002. As a result of this transaction, Fox now owned UPN's three largest affiliates; it already owned WWOR-TV in New York City and KCOP-TV in Los Angeles as a result of its $5.5 billion purchase of most of Chris-Craft's television holdings the previous year. Although rumors abounded that UPN's future was in jeopardy due to its three largest stations being effectively owned by the corporate parent of another network, Fox renewed the network's affiliation agreements for WPWR and the group's eight other UPN-affiliated stations for three additional years from September 24, 2003, to September 15, 2006.
MyNetworkTV affiliation (2006–2016)
On January 24, 2006, the Warner Bros. Entertainment unit of Time Warner and CBS Corporation announced that the two companies would shut down their respective networks, The WB and UPN, and combine their individual programs to create a new "fifth" television network called The CW. With the announcement, The CW signed a ten-year agreement with Tribune Broadcasting to affiliate 16 of the group's 19 WB affiliates—including Tribune flagship station WGN-TV—with the new network. In response to having its UPN affiliates be passed over for affiliations with The CW, Fox Television Stations stripped all network branding from and ceased promoting the network's programming on its UPN-affiliated stations. However, it is very unlikely that WPWR would have been selected as The CW's Chicago affiliate in any event. Representatives for The CW were on record as preferring to align with UPN and The WB's "strongest" affiliates; WGN-TV had been well ahead of WPWR in the ratings since the latter's sign-on.One month later on February 22, 2006, Fox announced the launch of its own "sixth" network called MyNetworkTV, which would be operated by Fox Television Stations and its sibling subsidiary Twentieth Television, with WPWR and the other Fox-owned UPN affiliates serving as the nuclei for the new network. In the interim, the station changed its on-air branding to "Power 50", which remained in use for most of the summer of 2006. However, the station simultaneously began to use the "My50" brand in some advertisements to promote the change, particularly at station-sponsored events held during that timeframe ; this brand began to be used by the station officially in July 2006. WPWR became a MyNetworkTV owned-and-operated station when the network launched on September 5, 2006.
In September 2014, the New York Post reported that Fox Television Stations was considering trading WPWR to Tribune Broadcasting, in exchange for acquiring that company's Seattle Fox affiliate KCPQ, as part of the company's efforts at the time to seek station purchases in markets with teams in the National Football Conference. Should the proposal have been accepted, Tribune would legally have been able to create a duopoly in Chicago as a result of the then-recent spin-off of its publishing business. On September 23, Tribune announced that it had been notified by Fox that its affiliation with KCPQ would be terminated effective January 17, 2015, but that discussions between the two companies were still ongoing; on October 7, The Wall Street Journal reported that WPWR was no longer included in the negotiations.