WMYD
WMYD is an independent television station in Detroit, Michigan, United States. It is owned by the E. W. Scripps Company alongside ABC affiliate WXYZ-TV. The two stations share studios at Broadcast House on 10 Mile Road in Southfield; WMYD's transmitter is located on Eight Mile Road in Oak Park.
Founded in 1968 as WXON on channel 62 and relocated to channel 20 in 1972, the station was an independent focusing primarily on syndicated programs and classic reruns. It made an ill-fated foray into subscription television from 1979 to 1983, broadcasting a pay service under the ON TV brand that was dogged by a poor relationship with the station and signal piracy issues exacerbated by Detroit's proximity to Canada. After it folded, WXON continued as an independent station and emerged as the second-rated independent in its market, affiliating with The WB in 1995.
Granite Broadcasting purchased WXON in 1997 and renamed it WDWB. However, its high debt load motivated several attempts to sell the station, one of which fell apart after The WB merged with UPN to form The CW but did not include WDWB as an affiliate. The station then became WMYD, aligned with MyNetworkTV and airing its programming for 15 years. In 2014, Scripps purchased WMYD and added local newscasts from the WXYZ-TV newsroom. As Detroit's ATSC 3.0 station, WMYD is used in automotive-related tests of the transmission technology. It was Detroit's affiliate for The CW from 2023 to 2024.
History
The channel 62 years
At the end of January 1965, Aben Johnson, majority owner of a chemical manufacturing company and with several real estate holdings, filed with the Federal Communications Commission to build a television station on channel 44 in Pontiac, in Oakland County. After an overhaul of the FCC's UHF table of allocations, Johnson amended his application to specify channel 62 in Detroit. A construction permit for the station was issued on October 7, 1965, and assigned the call sign WXON that December. Johnson also held construction permits for stations in Hammond, Indiana, and Akron, Ohio, which he called the Action Network and proposed to focus on programming for teen audiences. He considered a Detroit radio station as well before learning how saturated the market was.After three years, WXON began broadcasting on September 15, 1968. While it had originally proposed to broadcast from Southfield, where a new UHF transmission facility was being built for WKBD-TV and three other stations, Johnson bowed out and built his own transmitter facility and studio at 14 Mile and Decker roads in Walled Lake. Syndicated reruns and movies were joined by Rae Dean and Friends, a series of children's puppets conducted by Frank Deal and previously seen on WJRT-TV in Flint. The small facility, with its lower costs of operation, also produced commercials seen on other local TV stations; a revival of Robin Seymour's Swingin' Time, a dance show that had been canceled by CKLW-TV in Windsor, Ontario; and a syndicated wrestling program, Big Time Wrestling. However, the station's signal coverage of Detroit itself proved poorer than expected.
Move to channel 20
In an unusual circumstance, a full transmitter facility for channel 20 at Southfield had been built, but the station slated to use it had failed to start. In 1964, United Broadcasting Company had purchased the construction permit for WJMY, which had briefly broadcast from Allen Park from 1962 to 1963 but was no longer on the air. United proposed to return it to the air with a focus on specialty ethnic programs from the new Southfield UHF mast, but planned dates came and went without any activity, including an announced May 1969 groundbreaking on studios.However, United faced increasing legal scrutiny that primarily centered around issues at its radio and television stations in Washington, D.C., WOOK and WFAN-TV, and extended to several other properties. After a sale of WJMY to United Artists fell through, in December 1970, United filed to sell the construction permit for WJMY to WXON—which had reportedly lost $136,000 in its first two years of operation because of the deficient signal in the full market—with the purpose of moving WXON to channel 20. Land mobile radio users protested the proposal, asking for the fallow channel 20 to be turned over for their use, but the FCC approved the deal in June 1972, finding that United's inability to utilize the improved WJMY-TV facility was due to its own financial troubles. Johnson announced the station would relocate its studios from Walled Lake and floated the possibility of changing the call sign.
In November 1972, WXON went off channel 62 and remained off the air for a month to effectuate the change to channel 20. Broadcasting resumed on channel 20 on December 9. Several new shows were added with the channel change, including The 700 Club. In 1975, the city of license for the station was changed from Allen Park to Detroit, and the studios were moved to the transmitter site in Southfield.
Through the 1970s, WXON primarily focused on syndicated output. It did, however, bring late-night horror movie cult favorite The Ghoul Show back to Detroit television after WKBD had canceled his show in 1976; The Ghoul would air in two stints on the station, from 1977 to 1979 and again for several years in the early 1980s. Though Gordon Castelnero, who wrote a 2006 book on local TV programming in Detroit, characterized WXON as producing "virtually no local programming to speak of" outside The Ghoul during the 1970s, there were other shows. Twice during the decade, it aired a television version of the long-running Middle East Melodies radio show, which featured guests as well as belly dancers.
Subscription television
As early as 1970, WXON eyed the possibility of broadcasting scrambled subscription television programming to paying subscribers, filing one of the first applications for such a service at the FCC. The FCC approved this application in 1977, and the same year, WXON struck an agreement with National Subscription Television, owner of the ON TV service that started in Los Angeles that year, to provide STV programs to air on the station. Under a 1978 agreement between Oak Industries and Chartwell Communications – the two partners in National Subscription Television – Chartwell was given the Detroit market to develop. The two parties successfully aimed for a July 1, 1979, launch. Unlike in other markets, Chartwell selected equipment from Oak's rival, Blonder-Tongue. This decision drew Oak's ire when Chartwell ordered more Blonder-Tongue equipment in 1981, part of a falling-out that saw Oak buy out Chartwell's stake in the successful ON TV system in Los Angeles.The ON TV service in Detroit quickly gained 15,000 subscribers within three months and snared the rights to Detroit Red Wings hockey, Detroit Tigers baseball, and Michigan Wolverines athletics. In the case of the Wolverines, it even ran one experimental 1979 telecast live, a presentation spearheaded by Michigan athletic director Don Canham with the blessing of the NCAA.
However, ON TV in Detroit was challenged on several fronts, one of which had an outsize impact: the manufacture of pirate decoder boxes to receive the ON TV signal without being an actual subscriber. This issue was particularly pronounced in Detroit because ON TV could not legally sell its service across the Detroit River in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission's then-ongoing study of pay television services prompted ON TV to halt any plans to start its own business operations there; when asked about the possibility of ON TV being legal in Canada, Minister of Communications David MacDonald replied that the idea "would appear to fly in the face of every statement that's ever been made about Canadian broadcasting". Consequently, a cottage industry of illegal decoder box manufacturing arose in Windsor. This activity was unregulated in Canada, but as Americans began to purchase the Canadian decoders and use them in the United States, they posed a serious legal threat to the viability of Chartwell's subscription operation. In late May 1981, the company stationed process servers outside of the Windsor offices of one decoder manufacturer, Video Gallery, to dissuade potential U.S. buyers. Chartwell then successfully took Video Gallery and its American clients to U.S. federal court, seeking and obtaining an injunction to prevent Americans from importing its products. In response, Video Gallery obtained an injunction in an Ontario court preventing ON TV representatives from interfering with customers entering its store.
The U.S. government closed the border to Canadian decoders in August. Video Gallery closed at the end of the year, and Chartwell won a $618,000 judgment against it in March 1982. Even then, it was estimated that some 10,000 additional households received ON TV in southwestern Ontario, including on master antenna systems in apartment complexes—none of them making money for Chartwell. ON TV in Detroit, as elsewhere, responded to the piracy by modifying pulse signals and introducing new scrambling techniques. In Detroit, Chartwell began migrating to a new generation of decoder boxes in an attempt to stem its piracy problem.
Equally debilitating for ON TV in Detroit was its relationship with WXON, which included disputes over airtime and programming content. After airing the R-rated movie Is There Sex After Death? on March 12, 1980, the station then ordered ON TV to screen all movies it aired for WXON executives. More critically, however, the station refused to cede any time before 8 p.m. and aired reruns in that time slot, severely crippling it as a sports broadcaster; WXON noted that it had already committed to air and sold advertising around reruns of the series Baretta in the 7 p.m. hour, and after February 1982, it refused to lease the 7:30 p.m. half hour to ON TV on an as-needed basis. Midweek Red Wings and Tigers games regularly began before ON TV was on the air, forcing the station to join games in progress or tape delay them. The flaw became highly visible when the Red Wings played the Calgary Flames in a game on October 29, 1981, in which the Red Wings scored five goals in the first period before ON TV picked up the game. WXON then sued ON TV to get out of what Chartwell claimed was a "fifty-year contract" with the station. After the 1982 season, ON TV dropped its Tigers deal because it could not secure the air time it needed to telecast games in their entirety. As a result, the subscription service could not offer sports programming, nor could it broadcast an adult programming tier, a lucrative add-on with high uptake at STV services nationwide.
When ON TV closed in Detroit on March 31, 1983, with the alleged "censorship" and other issues being cited, Chartwell shuttered a business in which it had invested $13 million but never turned a profit. The system—which was vigorously competing against it, the subscription service on Ann Arbor–based WIHT, and Livonia-based MDS service MORE-TV, in addition to rapidly proliferating cable services—had lost 26,000 of the 68,000 subscribers it claimed at its peak.
In a 1988 interview with The Windsor Star, Doug Johnson—Aben's son, who had started working at the station around the time of the channel switch and progressively took over management duties—would state his regret for his station's foray into subscription television, claiming that it set back the development of WXON by several years.