WTTV


WTTV in Bloomington, Indiana, and WTTK in Kokomo, Indiana, are television stations serving as the CBS affiliates for Central Indiana, including the Indianapolis area. They are owned by Nexstar Media Group alongside Fox affiliate WXIN. The stations share studios on Network Place in northwestern Indianapolis. WTTV's transmitter is located on State Road 252 in Trafalgar, while WTTK's transmitter sits on West 73rd Street on the northern outskirts of Indianapolis.
WTTK operates as a full-time satellite of WTTV; its existence is only acknowledged in station identifications. WTTK was originally used to bring WTTV's programming to areas of central Indiana that had trouble receiving the main WTTV signal. However, with the transmitter's relocation into Marion County, it nearly duplicates the signal contours of ABC affiliate WRTV, CW affiliate WISH-TV, NBC affiliate WTHR, MyNetworkTV affiliate WNDY-TV, and WXIN. Despite Kokomo being WTTK's city of license, there has never been any physical office or employees located in that area.

History

Early history

WTTV first signed on the air on November 11, 1949, originally broadcasting on VHF channel 10. It was the second television station to sign on in the state of Indiana, debuting almost months after WFBM-TV signed on in May 1949. It has made the claim to being Indiana's oldest "continuously operating" television station because WFBM-TV had experienced a transmitter failure which took it off the air for an extended period of time shortly after WTTV signed on. Owned by Sarkes Tarzian, a Bloomington-based radio manufacturer and broadcaster, the station originally operated as a primary NBC affiliate with secondary affiliations with ABC and the DuMont Television Network. It also aired programming from CBS on occasion.
WTTV originally transmitted its signal from its studio just south of downtown Bloomington, shared with sister station WTTS, which went on the air in March 1949. Sarkes Tarzian built a new studio and transmitter on the north end of the Tarzian factory property on Bloomington's south side in 1952. Also that same year the release of the FCC's Sixth Report and Order, which ended a four-year suspension of television station permit and license awards, also saw a reallocation of VHF channel assignments across the United States—including in Bloomington, where WTTV was forced to move from channel 10 to the newly assigned channel 4. The switch took effect on February 21, 1954, and as a result, WTTV's transmitter was moved to a tower near Cloverdale, and the power was increased to 100,000 watts. The station's former channel 10 allocation was moved to Terre Haute and awarded to WTHI-TV, which signed on in July 1954.
In its early years, instead of buying most of the expensive items needed to run a television station, Tarzian had his own engineers and technicians design and build the items needed. For example, an overhead microphone boom cost approximately $300. Tarzian employees built one for less than $30. When Tarzian decided to start broadcasting network programs, establishing a coaxial cable link from Cincinnati would prove impractical, so Tarzian built his own microwave relay system from Cincinnati to Bloomington.
The station lost the ABC affiliation after WISH-TV signed on in July 1954. In 1956, the station lost the NBC affiliation to WFBM-TV; WTTV rejoined ABC after WISH-TV took a primary affiliation with CBS. That same year, it relocated its studio facilities to a site at Bluff Road on the south side of Indianapolis, although the station retained its studios on the Tarzian property in Bloomington as an auxiliary site for many years afterward. In the late 1950s, the station began producing some of its local programs in color; WTTV would convert to full color broadcasts in the fall of 1965, after it purchased color-capable camera equipment.
The station activated its current tower in Trafalgar, the tallest structure in Indiana at above ground level, in 1957; WTTV was joined on the tower by a new radio station, Bloomington-licensed WTTV-FM in 1960. The transmitter facility is located farther south than Indianapolis' other major television stations due to FCC regulations that require a station's transmitter site be located no more than from its city of license—in this case, Bloomington, which is south of Indianapolis. WTTV only provided a grade B signal to the city's northern suburbs and could not be seen at all in the far northern portions of the market. As a result, most of these areas only got a clear signal from channel 4 when cable television arrived in central Indiana in the late 1960s. Because of this rule, when WTTV regained the ABC affiliation, WLBC-TV in Muncie served as the de facto ABC affiliate for the northern part of the market.

As an independent station

On October 30, 1957, WTTV became an independent station after losing the ABC affiliation to upstart WLWI. In its early years as an independent, WTTV began running a test pattern at 2 p.m. until regular programming began at 4 pm. The station initially ran older movies and low-budget syndicated programs as well as some of its own locally produced programming. By the 1970s, WTTV began signing on by 6 a.m. and stayed on the air until at least 2 am. In addition to local programming, WTTV aired plenty of movies during the early afternoon and in prime time. It also aired cartoons, which were mixed in with locally produced children's programs in the afternoons from 3 to 5 p.m. as well as off-network sitcoms in the evenings.
As cable expanded in the Midwest during the 1970s, WTTV became a regional superstation. At its height, it was available on nearly every cable system in Indiana outside the Chicago metropolitan area, which contained Northwest Indiana. It was also carried in large portions of Ohio and Kentucky, including Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, and Louisville. Due to the syndication exclusivity rule, it disappeared from most cable systems outside Indiana in the late 1980s.
Sarkes Tarzian sold WTTV to Teleco for $26.5 million in September 1978 ; the station was then sold to the Tel-Am Corporation in March 1984. In December 1978, Broadcasting reported that NBC was considering either WTTV or WTHR as potential replacement affiliates for WRTV, which was in the process of switching from NBC to ABC. NBC ultimately reached an agreement to shift the affiliation to outgoing ABC affiliate WTHR, effective June 1, 1979. By the mid-1980s, WTTV began airing more cartoons and first-run syndicated talk shows during the daytime, as well as an increased number of recent off-network sitcoms during the evening. The station also began broadcasting 24 hours a day of programming by that time. Although it was one of the strongest independent stations in the country, WTTV opted against affiliating with the upstart Fox network in 1986—one of the few long-established independents to do so. This was mainly because most of the markets in its large cable footprint had enough stations to provide Fox affiliates of their own, making the prospect of being a multi-state Fox affiliate unattractive to channel 4. The Fox affiliation in the Indianapolis market instead went to eventual sister station WXIN, which became a charter affiliate of the network when it launched on October 9 of that year.
In 1987, Tel-Am purchased the construction permit for WWKI-TV in Kokomo, north of Indianapolis, from B.G.S. Broadcasting. B.G.S., who also owned WWKI radio until 1986, had concluded that there were not nearly enough viewers in north-central Indiana for WWKI-TV to be viable as a standalone station, and its merger with WTTV allowed channel 29 to come on the air. On May 1, 1988, Tel-Am signed channel 29 on as WTTK, a full-time satellite of WTTV, to improve its over-the-air coverage in northern portions of the market that could not receive the WTTV signal. Tel-Am filed for bankruptcy in 1987; Raleigh, North Carolina–based Capitol Broadcasting Company purchased WTTV and WTTK in July 1988, after an attempt to sell the station to locally based Emmis Communications fell through. The stations were then sold to River City Broadcasting in 1991. The station carried PTEN programming through that entity's full existence.

From UPN to The WB

WTTV became a charter affiliate of the United Paramount Network when the network launched on January 16, 1995. In April 1996, River City Broadcasting merged with the Sinclair Broadcast Group in a $1.2 billion deal. However, due to FCC regulations at that time which prohibited the common ownership of two full-power commercial television stations in the same market, Sinclair had to obtain a cross-ownership waiver to retain ownership of WTTV/WTTK and the company's existing Indianapolis station, inTV affiliate WIIB, which the company eventually sold to DP Media two years later.
In 1997, Sinclair signed a deal with The WB to affiliate with several UPN-affiliated and independent stations that the company either managed or owned outright. While WTTV was not included in the original deal, Sinclair subsequently notified UPN that it was not interested in renewing the station's affiliation, leading network sister company Paramount Stations Group to strike a deal to buy WB charter affiliate WNDY-TV, though Paramount pledged at the time to keep WNDY a WB affiliate through the expiration of its contract in January 1999. WTTV temporarily returned to being an independent station when its contract with UPN expired on January 16, 1998, filling its prime time schedule with movies; on January 22, WNDY began to carry UPN programming in addition to The WB. WTTV then replaced WNDY as the market's WB affiliate on April 6, 1998, and changed its on-air branding to "WB 4 Indiana"; channel 23 then became a full-time UPN affiliate.
As The WB pushed for market exclusivity for its local affiliates as the network increased its national distribution beyond the Tribune Company's television stations and the superstation feed of its Chicago affiliate WGN-TV, Sinclair decided to wind down carriage agreements that the station had with cable providers located outside of the Indianapolis market. The station remained available on cable systems on the Indiana side of the Terre Haute market until 2017, when it was replaced by WTHI-DT3 as a new CW affiliate for the market, with The CW moving to now-sister station WTWO's second subchannel in 2024 as Nexstar consolidated the network onto its own stations where possible.
On April 19, 2002, Sinclair Broadcast Group sold WTTV and WTTK to Tribune Broadcasting for $125 million, creating the market's first television duopoly under current FCC regulations with Fox affiliate WXIN; the purchase was finalized on July 24 of that year.
Although WTTV was the longer-established of the two stations, Tribune chose to keep the Fox affiliation on WXIN due in part to WTTV's then-weaker analog signal in the northern part of the market. Additionally, the NFL on Fox, until the 2014 implementation of Fox/CBS cross-flex scheduling, could only carry two Indianapolis Colts home games with National Football Conference opponents each year as the team is part of the National Football League's American Football Conference, so the need for Fox to have an analog-era VHF affiliate in the market was less important than if it was an NFC market. WTTV merged its operations with those of WXIN in 2004, when the latter moved its operations into new facilities at 6910 Network Place at the Intech Park office development on the city's northwest side. The old WTTV facility on Bluff Road remained abandoned until being razed in 2016.