WPSG


WPSG, branded Philly 57, is an independent television station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. It is owned by the CBS News and Stations group alongside CBS outlet KYW-TV. The two stations share studios on Hamilton Street north of Center City Philadelphia; WPSG's transmitter is located in the city's Roxborough section.
Channel 57 was allocated for commercial use in Philadelphia at the start of the 1970s; it was fought over by two groups who sought to broadcast subscription television programming to paying customers in the metropolitan area. Radio Broadcasting Company prevailed and launched WWSG-TV on June 15, 1981. It offered limited financial news programming, which was abandoned after 18 months, and a subscription service utilizing programming from SelecTV. Two years later, the station switched to broadcasting PRISM, a premium regional sports and movies service seeking to reach potential subscribers in areas beyond cable coverage, such as the city of Philadelphia.
The Grant Broadcasting System acquired the station and relaunched it in 1985 as general-entertainment independent WGBS-TV, known on air as "Philly 57". The new owners spent millions of dollars on programming and the rights to Philadelphia Flyers hockey and Villanova Wildcats basketball; the station filled the third independent void left when WKBS-TV folded in 1983, and its entrance into the market clipped multiple separate efforts to establish such a station. However, Grant's strategy to build "full-grown" independents with expensive acquisitions drove the company into bankruptcy in December 1986. Grant's three stations were assumed by a consortium of creditors and bondholders known as Combined Broadcasting; management was controlled from Philadelphia. Combined Broadcasting solicited offers on its stations in 1993; a deal was reached to sell to the Fox network, but an objection caused the sale to be delayed and canceled.
In 1995, Paramount Stations Group acquired WGBS-TV, which then became an owned-and-operated station of the United Paramount Network under new WPSG call letters. Paramount returned professional sports to the station after an absence of several years; from the late 1990s to the late 2000s, Flyers, Philadelphia 76ers basketball, and Philadelphia Phillies baseball games were broadcast on channel 57. Paramount's corporate parent, Viacom, merged with CBS in 2000, and WPSG's operations were merged with those of KYW-TV. Upon the merger of The WB and UPN into The CW in 2006, channel 57 began broadcasting that network's programming; after CBS sold most of its stake in the network to Nexstar Media Group in 2022, CBS disaffiliated its eight CW stations from the network effective September 1, 2023. Since the CBS merger, there have been several instances of local news programming on the station.

History

WWSG-TV: The STV years

Channel 57 had been assigned to Philadelphia as an educational channel, but in 1970, Vue-Metrics, Inc. expressed interest in starting a station in Philadelphia. Its goal was to broadcast over-the-air subscription television programming on the station—in fact, Vue-Metrics filed the first request to the FCC for regular FCC authorization. It originally filed for channel 23, but the Federal Communications Commission was in the process of redesignating that channel for educational use at Camden, New Jersey, leading to the designation of channel 57 for commercial use in Philadelphia. Vue-Metrics was not the only company to express interest in channel 57 as a conduit for STV: Radio Broadcasting Company applied on December 24, 1971, for the channel. The two groups proposed different systems for delivering the STV service. Vue-Metrics specified the use of the Phonevision system by Zenith Electronics, while RBC intended to use equipment made by Blonder-Tongue.
A designation of the Vue-Metrics and Radio Broadcasting Company applications for comparative hearing did not come until June 24, 1976; issues to be raised in the hearing primarily centered around the finances of each bidder. An initial decision from an FCC hearing examiner, favoring Radio Broadcasting Company, was issued in September 1977. By this time, there had been substantial changes in the proposal. Instead of Phonevision, the subscription operation proposed for channel 57 would be a franchisee of ON TV, whose first service in Los Angeles had launched that March, and use equipment developed by one of ON TV's owners, Oak Industries. The examiner's initial decision did not represent not an immediate green light to start building. Vue-Metrics, which was now headed by Robert S. Block, had appealed the examiner's earlier move to dismiss its application as incomplete to the full FCC. The commission upheld the initial decision in October 1978. Construction began in 1979, with the company opting to begin the process of erecting facilities in the Manayunk area despite Vue-Metrics continuing its appeals in federal court.
On June 15, 1981, WWSG-TV—named for RBC owner William S. Gross—took to the air for the first time with the movie The North Avenue Irregulars. Its first program broadcasts were entirely scrambled and seen by next to nobody: there were fewer than 50 installed households, all of them belonging to station employees. Even though its STV service used Oak equipment, it utilized movies from SelecTV, Oak's primary competitor. WWSG-TV joined a series of communications-related businesses under the RBC umbrella, including mobile paging, background music, and the distribution of HBO to area multipoint microwave services. Delays in the launch of its daytime commercial program provider, the new Financial News Network, postponed the start of non-STV broadcasts to November 30. With FNN on air, the station aired financial programming and talk shows from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., when STV service began.
WWSG-TV's SelecTV was not the only subscription service to enter the Delaware Valley in 1981. Later that year, Wometco Home Theater expanded south from its base in New York City by launching on WRBV-TV in Vineland, New Jersey. Even though SelecTV got on the air first, WHT initially took the lead in subscribers. By January 1983, WHT had 20,000 subscribers to SelecTV's 12,000. After subscription TV was deregulated by the FCC in 1982, removing a rule that stations had to provide 28 hours a week of free programs, WWSG-TV dropped Financial News Network programming and began offering SelecTV around the clock on January 9, 1983.
1983 was a year of change for channel 57. In January, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that a consortium led by Oak and Ed Snider, owner of the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team, was seeking to buy WWSG-TV from RBC. Their proposal would replace SelecTV with an STV broadcast of regional premium cable service PRISM, which offered feature films and telecasts of home games of the Flyers, Philadelphia 76ers, and Philadelphia Phillies. A sale never transpired; in September, RBC reached a two-year deal to begin broadcasting PRISM on October 31, with the goal being to reach the city of Philadelphia, which did not have any cable service at the time. Even though subscribers would pay $3 more per month to watch PRISM than they had for SelecTV, very few subscribers opted to discontinue service, and the new availability of PRISM's sports coverage led to a surge in interest; a waiting list was necessary because RBC could not procure new decoders fast enough.
In its first unscrambled sports telecast in history, the station aired a Flyers telecast on November 15, 1984—Bobby Clarke Night—that was available to non-subscribers. The success of PRISM as a subscription service led Wometco Home Theater to leave the Philadelphia market at the end of November 1984.

WGBS-TV: The Grant years

At the start of 1985, rumors began to swirl that WWSG-TV was about to be sold and turned into a full-time ad-supported commercial station. Milton Grant, an independent station builder who had just put WBFS-TV on the air in Miami the year prior, was buying the rights to show various syndicated reruns, such as Dallas and Eight Is Enough, in the Philadelphia market, contingent on the purchase of channel 57. In March, the rumors were confirmed: Grant's company, Grant Broadcasting System, was purchasing WWSG-TV from RBC for $30 million at the same time that the Gross family sought to buy WWAC-TV in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Grant intended not only to convert channel 57 to ad-supported programming but upgrade its underpowered transmitting facility to the UHF maximum of five million watts. The filing of the application revealed that RBC had lost nearly $750,000 since 1981 on its STV venture. This compared with the $32.5 million RBC had made the year before by selling its successful paging business to communications conglomerate Metromedia. In the sale, Gross retained lifetime rights to conduct datacasting in the vertical blanking interval of the television station, which he used to start a business transmitting text information to scrolling displays in bars and restaurants. On October 20, 1985, WWSG-TV became WGBS-TV—call letters representing the Grant Broadcasting System—operating from studios on 20th Street and branding as Philly 57.
Grant promised to "come on full-grown" with his new channel 57, and his company was able to make splashy acquisitions in part because Philadelphia only had two independent stations. The station that had been the third independent in the market, WKBS-TV, had been shuttered in 1983 owing to the dissolution of its owner, Field Communications. When Grant inquired who had the rights to air Villanova men's basketball, the answer was nobody: there had been no regular broadcasts of the Philadelphia Big 5 since channel 48 left the air. GBS, seeking to mirror the tentpole sports acquisitions it had made in Miami, signed a three-year deal for at least 20 Villanova basketball games and telecasts of the revived Villanova football team, worth nearly $1 million. Three months later, the Flyers ended a 15-year relationship with WTAF-TV to become the primary sports attraction on channel 57 as part of a $3.3 million contract; the team cited the recent purchase of the Phillies by a group headed by Taft Broadcasting, WTAF-TV's owner. The start of the first season of WGBS-TV was marred by the fact that not all cable systems added it to their lineups in the wake of must-carry regulations being struck down by a federal court earlier that year; this slightly limited the station's reach, particularly compared to its independent competitors.
In the field of entertainment programming, Grant brought its free-spending ways to the Philadelphia market. This would send ripples through several other groups' plans to enter the market. At the time, channel 48 was in the comparative hearing stage for a new licensee, and one company, BCT Communications, withdrew from the contest in November 1985. The company's lawyer told The Inquirer, "I think Milt Grant was doing a pretty good number on tying up whatever programming was available." In July 1986, WTGI-TV launched from Wilmington, Delaware; channel 57's relaunch eclipsed its original programming plan, and the station switched to a home shopping and later multicultural format. Another competitor, WSJT-TV—the former WRBV-TV—took itself out of the running that same year by selling to the Home Shopping Network.