WBPX-TV
WBPX-TV is a television station in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, airing programming from the Ion Television network. It is owned and operated by the Ion Media subsidiary of the E.W. Scripps Company, which also owns Woburn-licensed Grit station WDPX-TV ; the two channels share the same TV spectrum. WBPX-TV and WDPX-TV are broadcast from a tower on Parmenter Road in Hudson, Massachusetts.
WBPX-TV's programming is duplicated on WPXG-TV in Concord, New Hampshire, which shares its channel with Lowell, Massachusetts–licensed Daystar station WYDN and broadcasts from Fort Mountain near Epsom, New Hampshire.
WBPX-TV began broadcasting as WQTV in 1979 and originally broadcast subscription television programming to paying customers, which ended in 1983, with the station operating as a full-time commercial independent station until succumbing to financial troubles and paring back its programming. After being sold to The Christian Science Monitor in 1986, WQTV became the nucleus of a major production operation, which in 1991 spawned a cable television channel, the Monitor Channel. After $325 million in losses, this service shut down in 1992, and The Monitor sold WQTV to Boston University, which operated it for six years as commercial independent WABU. Boston University also bought the Concord station, which had been silent since it failed as CBS affiliate WNHT in 1989, and turned it into a satellite of WABU in 1995. Both stations were sold in 1999 to become outlets of the Pax network, which changed its name to i in 2005 before becoming known as Ion in 2007.
Early history
The subscription television years
On June 3, 1966, Boston Heritage Broadcasting, Inc.—a consortium of local owners and New Jersey–based Blonder-Tongue Laboratories—filed an application for a construction permit for channel 68 in Boston, which the Federal Communications Commission granted on September 23, 1969, after a comparative hearing. Boston Heritage then filed the third-ever application for authority to install subscription television equipment in July 1970, which the FCC granted three years later.Even though a construction permit had been awarded in 1969, it would be nearly a decade before channel 68 broadcast. By late 1977, Boston Heritage had begun work to build the transmitter on the Prudential Tower, and Blonder-Tongue's pay-TV system was already in use in the New York area. The subscription television programs to be aired on the station would come from Universal Subscription Television, a subsidiary of Canadian company CanWest Capital Corporation. CanWest was in the middle of assembling a network of stations to air its programming, with outlets in various stages of consideration on New York's Long Island and in Detroit, Minneapolis, and Sacramento.
WQTV began program testing at the very end of 1978 and regular programming on January 2, 1979. The subscription service, named BEST at launch, became known as StarCase in May 1979. That month, the station's only non-subscription programs were paid-for ethnic and religious hours. Universal was prompted to abandon its plan to sign up subscribers by area because prospective customers kept calling, having dialed past channel 56 to see the new station on their sets. Further interest was sparked when StarCase began broadcasting adult films in late-night hours.
Universal Subscription Television was acquired in two parts during the course of 1981 by Satellite Television & Associated Resources of Santa Monica, California; after acquiring franchises for unbuilt services on stations in San Jose and Detroit in January, STAR then spent $20.5 million to acquire the Boston StarCase service and another $600,000 for WQTV itself. The service was rebranded Star with the sale. Star offered partial-season coverage of the Boston Celtics to subscribers in the 1981–82 season, mostly because cable carrier PRISM New England was not available on the Boston cable system at the time.
Channel 68 was not the only purveyor of subscription television programming in Massachusetts; alongside a microwave distribution system carrying HBO, its primary over-the-air competition came from Preview, owned by American Television and Communications —the cable division of Time, Inc.—and broadcast on WSMW-TV from Worcester. By June 1982, generally the zenith of STV's existence nationally, Star was the 8th-largest service in the nation with 52,000 subscribers; Preview was the 7th-largest with 60,000.
Beginning in late 1982, subscription television began to decline as an industry due to increased penetration of cable services. Satellite Television & Associated Resources would be one of the first and highest-profile failures in the industry. At the end of January, Star's 23,000 remaining subscribers received Preview program guides for February; the end for Star came on the night of February 12, when customers were confronted with a graphic slide after a second mortgage holder foreclosed on the operation and sold its assets privately. Preview bought the subscriber list and temporarily simulcast most of its programming on both channels 68 and 27 until it could switch Star's subscribers to Preview equipment. At the end of March, Satellite Television & Associated Resources, with $12 million in liabilities, was forced into Chapter 7 bankruptcy by three movie studios and an advertising company in Los Angeles.
"Where the Stars Shine"
Preview's transitional service for former Star customers and promotional messages for Preview occupied WQTV's evening hours until September 5, 1983, when channel 68 launched a new ad-supported evening lineup. The station's existing daytime programming from the Financial News Network was joined by syndicated fare including Kojak, Barnaby Jones and Tic-Tac-Dough. The new programming proved popular enough that the FNN daytime programming was discontinued on April 2, 1984.WQTV became an aggressive buyer of programs and an aggressive promoter of its programming. The station relocated its studios to a site on Soldiers Field Road in Brighton. It managed to see ratings increases, and sales nearly doubled in 1985 to $4.2 million. However, the early 1980s had brought a boom in independent stations and rapid increases in the prices for syndicated programming that formed the backbone of these stations. WQTV succumbed in December 1985 and laid off all except "the essential operating staff"—dismissing more than half of its 40 workers—in a desperate bid to cut costs; it also put itself on the market. Many popular programs were axed by the station because they had become too expensive, while WQTV's national sales representative resigned from the position and began considering "further action" to obtain back payments. Clifford Curley, the general manager, managed to get the station to turn an operating profit in the first months of 1986 by subsisting on pre-1948 films, any and every network show turned down by the local affiliates, and other titles it owned in perpetuity, along with aggressively promoting the studios for lease to industrial filmmakers.
Within six months of going on the market, it had been joined by two competing independent stations: WXNE-TV and WSBK-TV, with stronger programming portfolios and higher asking prices. Emerson College, owner of noncommercial WERS, was invited to make a bid.
''Christian Science Monitor'' ownership
On May 28, 1986, The Christian Science Monitor, a daily newspaper owned by the Boston-based Church of Christ, Scientist, announced it would purchase WQTV for $7.5 million. It was the first broadcasting property to be owned by The Monitor, though the long-running publication had been involved in electronic media for nearly a decade with a news service for commercial radio stations, begun in 1977, and the half-hour Monitoradio program distributed through American Public Radio. The transaction closed six months later, by which time channel 68 had essentially fallen out of contention in the Boston market. After selling the station, former owner WQTV, Inc., was forced into Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation by program distributors at the start of 1987; MCA Television, Paramount Television and 20th Century Fox Television alleged they had not been paid in six months. The Christian Science Monitor Syndicate was formed to serve as WQTV's licensee in order to comply with equal employment opportunity laws for broadcasters; The Monitor itself employed only Christian Scientists.The Monitor hired Allan Ginsberg, the former vice president of Metromedia, and announced that it would not operate WQTV with an all-religious lineup; instead, channel 68 would feature commercial programs along with some programming already produced by the newspaper, such as the weekly Christian Science Monitor Reports, which was distributed through Independent Network News to 88 stations across the country. This program had debuted as a monthly show in 1985, though it aired in off hours and often on smaller, lesser-viewed stations. It had reason to begin an extensive expansion into broadcasting: the newspaper was prestigious but a longtime money-loser for Christian Science.
The Monitor-produced programming was restructured in September 1988, when World Monitor, a half-hour international news program hosted by former NBC News correspondent John Hart, debuted on WQTV in Boston and nationally on The Discovery Channel; the program almost aired on A&E, but Monitor executive John H. Hoagland, Jr., turned it down for a higher-priced offer from Discovery, a decision he would later regret. The original concept for World Monitor involved four co-anchors in Boston, London, Tokyo and Washington; this was scrapped when Hoagland hired Sanford Socolow, former executive producer of the CBS Evening News, who deemed the concept unworkable. The new program debuted to favorable reviews in the national media.
The introduction of World Monitor presaged a total programming change in April 1989; WQTV dropped almost all of its remaining entertainment programming—retaining just a handful of nature and children's shows—and began offering a suite of new Monitor-produced public affairs programs. The move was ordered by Hoagland, an ex-CIA officer and head of the Christian Science Publishing Society who became chair of the new Monitor television operation, against the advice of broadcast consultants; the new programs would appeal to the psychographic of the "global citizen" as opposed to demographics typically used in television targeting. Newer, more expensive consultants were then hired; one television producer noted that these consultants "talked The Monitor into incredible expenses" that amounted to a "flagrant waste of money", while a church member described the new consultants as "yes-men". An unsolicited $25 million offer for WQTV, made in 1988 by a group of outside investors, was rejected as a new project emerged on the horizon, using the internal name of "TV: Special Programming"—a 24-hour cable television service.
Even though ratings dropped precipitously for channel 68 after the removal of many of the syndicated shows, with the network plan well into development but still not publicly announced, Monitor officials forged ahead and announced they would add another 24 hours a week of new output on WQTV by early 1990, intending to syndicate some of it nationally. Programs on the air at this time included the newsmagazine One Norway Street; Today's Monitor, featuring looks at stories in that day's newspaper; the Spanish-language Monitor de Hoy, the first-ever Spanish-language TV show in Boston; 50 Years Ago Today, featuring excerpts from 50-year-old issues of The Monitor; and the weekly minority-oriented Inner City Beat, hosted by longtime Monitor journalist Luix Overbea. Religious programs featured in only a limited capacity: a daily Bible lesson and a five-minute reading of the religious article in The Monitor. This was supplemented by foreign-purchased programs, such as the 42-part Japanese documentary The Silk Road. Some of the new programs found their way to the WWOR EMI Service, the superstation feed of New York television station WWOR-TV, which was created at the start of 1990 to substitute some of the New York station's programming due to new syndication exclusivity rules. By 1990, World Monitor alone cost some $20 million a year to produce; that same year, Canadian journalist Peter Kent joined as reporter and substitute anchor, a post he would hold until the program ceased production in 1992.