WPVI-TV


WPVI-TV is a television station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Owned and operated by the ABC television network through its ABC Owned Television Stations division, the station maintains studios on City Avenue in the Wynnefield Heights section of Philadelphia, and a transmitter in the city's Roxborough neighborhood.

History

WFIL-TV

The station first signed on the air on May 23, 1947, and began regular programming on September 13, 1947, as WFIL-TV. It is Philadelphia's second-oldest television station, signing on six years after WPTZ. The first program broadcast on channel 6 was a live remote of an exhibition game of the Philadelphia Eagles against the Chicago Bears from Franklin Field. This was followed by an inaugural program that evening.
WFIL-TV was originally owned by Walter Annenberg's Triangle Publications, publishers of The Philadelphia Inquirer and owners of WFIL radio. The WFIL stations were the flagship of the communications empire of Triangle Publications, which owned two Philadelphia newspapers, periodicals including TV Guide, Seventeen and the Daily Racing Form, and a broadcasting group that would grow to ten radio and six television stations. WFIL radio had been an ABC radio affiliate dating back to the network's existence as the NBC Blue Network. However, WFIL-TV started out carrying programming from the DuMont Television Network, as ABC had not yet ventured into broadcast television. When the ABC television network debuted on April 19, 1948, WFIL-TV became its first affiliate. Channel 6 joined ABC before the network's first owned-and-operated station, WJZ-TV in New York City, signed on in August that year. However, it retained a secondary affiliation with DuMont until that network shut down in 1956.
The WFIL radio stations originally broadcast from the Widener Building in downtown Philadelphia. With the anticipated arrival of WFIL-TV, Triangle secured a new facility for the stations, located at Market and 46th streets, which opened in 1947. In 1963, Triangle built one of the most advanced broadcast centers in the nation on City Avenue in the Wynnefield Heights community, in a circular building across from rival WCAU-TV. The station still broadcasts from the facility today, even as a new digital media building was constructed that now houses production of the station's newscasts and other local programs, while the original studio was turned over to public broadcaster WHYY-FM-TV.
Channel 6 was the first station to sign on from the Roxborough neighborhood. It started transmitting from a tower, but in 1957, it moved to a new tower, which it co-owned with NBC-owned WRCV-TV. The new tower added much of Delaware and the Lehigh Valley to the station's city-grade coverage. WFIL-TV was also one of the first TV stations in Philadelphia to broadcast local color.

WPVI-TV

In 1968, the Federal Communications Commission passed a rule barring companies from owning newspapers and broadcast outlets in the same market. However, the agency "grandfathered" several existing newspaper and broadcasting cross-combinations in several markets. Triangle asked the FCC to grandfather its cluster of the Inquirer, the Daily News and WFIL-AM-FM-TV, but was turned down. As a result, in 1969, one year after the new regulation was made official, Triangle sold the Inquirer and the Daily News to Knight Newspapers.
In 1970, the FCC forced Triangle to sell off its broadcasting properties due to protests from then-Pennsylvania Governor Milton Shapp. Shapp complained that Triangle had used its three Pennsylvania television stations—WFIL-TV, WLYH-TV in Lebanon and WFBG-TV in Altoona—in a smear campaign against him. The WFIL stations, along with radio-television combinations in New Haven, Connecticut, and Fresno, California, were sold to Capital Cities Communications. As a condition of the sale, Capital Cities had to spin off the radio stations to other entities – in Philadelphia, WFIL-FM was sold to its general manager John Richer, and WFIL went to LIN Broadcasting. On May 1, 1971, shortly after the sale was approved and Capital Cities took control of channel 6, WFIL-TV changed its call letters to the current WPVI-TV.
In March 1985, Capital Cities Communications announced it was purchasing ABC, a move that stunned the broadcast industry since ABC was some four times larger than Capital Cities at the time. Some have said that Capital Cities was only able to pull off the deal because WPVI-TV, the company's flagship property, had become very profitable in its own right. The FCC initially required Capital Cities to sell channel 6 and its sister station, WTNH in New Haven, Connecticut, as a condition of the purchase; both stations had significant signal overlaps with network flagship WABC-TV. At the time, the FCC normally did not allow common ownership of two stations with overlapping signals, similar to the same "one-to-a-market" rule that forced Triangle to split its newspaper/broadcast combination in Philadelphia many years earlier. Capital Cities sought a waiver of the rules to keep WPVI, citing CBS' then-ownership of WCAU-TV locally in Philadelphia and WCBS-TV in New York. The FCC granted the waiver, and when the transaction was finalized in early 1986, WPVI-TV became an ABC owned-and-operated station. Prior to that, WPVI has been ABC's largest affiliate not owned by the network. A decade later, in 1996, The Walt Disney Company purchased Capital Cities/ABC.
On January 22, 1987, the station partially rebroadcast the suicide of Pennsylvania state treasurer R. Budd Dwyer—which had occurred at a press conference earlier that morning—during its noon newscast.
In August 1999, WPVI partenered with Philly.com, a website from the Inquirer and the Daily News.
On September 12, 2009, WPVI moved to a new broadcasting complex at their same location at 4100 City Avenue near Bala Cynwyd next door to the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. The facilities are wired for high definition newscasts and is the third studio in the station's 72-year history since the station has moved to a circular building in 1964.
On December 19, 2023, at approximately 8:30 p.m. WPVI's Chopper 6 crashed in Washington Township, Burlington County, New Jersey, while returning from an assignment, killing both the pilot and photojournalist. The victims were identified as 67-year-old pilot Monroe Smith and 45-year-old photographer Christopher Dougherty.

Programming

Past program preemptions and deferrals

Under Capital Cities ownership, channel 6 frequently preempted ABC programming in favor of locally produced and syndicated shows. In January 1975, when ABC entered the morning news field with AM America, WPVI chose not to carry the second hour of the program in favor of continuing Captain Noah and His Magical Ark at 8 a.m.; in response to viewer complaints, the station later moved Captain Noah to 7 a.m., with the one hour of AM America shifting to a tape-delay at 8:30. When AM Americas successor, Good Morning America premiered in November 1975, WPVI-TV aired only one hour at 9 a.m. on tape. With the arrival of Donahue in January 1976, the station began clearing the first hour live at 7 a.m., with Captain Noah following at 8 a.m. Channel 6 began carrying both hours of GMA live in September 1978; Captain Noah was moved to weekends and remained there for the remainder of its run. Even in the years after WPVI became an ABC-owned station, it continued to preempt an hour of ABC daytime programs in favor of other programs. Wildwood, New Jersey–based NBC affiliate WMGM-TV picked up the preempted ABC shows until 1987, when those programs returned to channel 29, which was now WTXF-TV. The preempted programs were usually magazine shows, game shows or reruns of ABC prime time sitcoms. By the early 1990s, WPVI preempted only the first half-hour of The Home Show. WPVI-TV also did not run other ABC daytime programs, notably The Edge of Night and numerous sitcom reruns. ABC was able to get most of its daytime schedule on the air in Philadelphia anyway through contracts with independent stations WKBS-TV and WTAF-TV. In October 1997, per a directive from the new Disney ownership, WPVI-TV began carrying the entire ABC network schedule for the first time in the station's history with the network. It came at the expense of its highly rated local talk show, AM/Live, which was shifted to an overnight timeslot to make room for ABC's then-new talk show The View. AM/Live was moved to 12:35 a.m. following Politically Incorrect and was renamed Philly After Midnight, where it lasted until 2001.

Local programming

Channel 6 has a long history of producing local programs. On March 26, 1948, it aired a production of "Parsifal" from the John Wanamaker Store that featured Bruno Walter conducting 50 players from the Philadelphia Orchestra, a chorus of 300, and the Wanamaker Organ. Perhaps its most notable local production was Bandstand, which began in 1952 and originated from WFIL-TV's newly constructed Studio B. In 1957, ABC added the program as part of its weekday afternoon network lineup and renamed it American Bandstand to reflect its more widespread broadcast scope.
Other well known locally produced shows included the children's programs Captain Noah and His Magical Ark; a cartoon show hosted by Sally Starr; and Chief Halftown, and two variety programs: The Al Alberts Showcase, a talent show emceed by the lead singer of The Four Aces; and The Larry Ferrari Show, on which the host played organ versions of both popular and religious music. WFIL-TV also produced an early and long-running program on adult literacy, Operation Alphabet. One of its earliest local series was Let's Pop the Question, from 1947 to 1948.