WVTV
WVTV is a television station in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States, affiliated with The CW and owned by Rincon Broadcasting Group. The station's studios are located on Calumet Road in the Park Place office park near the I-41/US 45 interchange on Milwaukee's northwest side; its transmitter is located on North Humboldt Boulevard in Milwaukee's Estabrook Park neighborhood as part of the Milwaukee PBS tower.
WVTV operates a second digital subchannel affiliated with MyNetworkTV which brands as "My 24 WCGV". It uses virtual channel 24.1, formerly utilized by separately licensed WCGV-TV until January 2018, when then-owner Sinclair Broadcast Group turned in WCGV-TV's license and merged its subchannels onto WVTV's spectrum after selling WCGV-TV's spectrum in the 2016 Federal Communications Commission incentive auction.
History
Early years
WVTV is the second-oldest continuously operating station in Milwaukee. The station first signed on the air on October 3, 1953, as WOKY-TV, broadcasting on UHF channel 19. It was owned by Bartell Broadcasters, along with WOKY radio. The station originally operated as a primary ABC and secondary DuMont affiliate. On October 21, 1954, CBS purchased WOKY-TV for $335,000 and announced it was moving its programming there from its original affiliate in the city, WCAN-TV. The purchase resulted in a call letter change to WXIX on February 27, 1955. It then moved into WCAN's former studio on North 27th Street, where it remained until being sold by CBS less than four years later.This made the station the first network owned-and-operated station in the Milwaukee market. WXIX's tenure as a CBS O&O, however, was not successful. Only a small percentage of television sets in the Milwaukee area were even capable of receiving UHF stations at the time, as set manufacturers were not required to equip televisions with UHF tuners until 1964 as a result of the 1961 passage of the All-Channel Receiver Act. Those viewers not lucky enough to get a signal from WBBM-TV in Chicago, WISC-TV in Madison, or WBAY-TV in Green Bay were forced to rely on expensive UHF converters to watch channel 19, and even then the picture quality left a lot to be desired. However, unlike many early UHF stations, it managed to survive into the All-Channel era.
The station moved to channel 18 in 1958 in a Federal Communications Commission channel alignment change. However, this saw little improvement in the ratings. CBS concluded that it was better to have its programming on a VHF station, even if it was only an affiliate. The obvious candidate was independent station WITI-TV, which had just signed on two years earlier. CBS officially moved its programming to WITI on April 1, 1959. WITI also took over the WXIX studio facilities on North 27th Street, the same facilities once occupied by former CBS affiliate WCAN-TV. WXIX went dark that same day but returned on July 20 of that year after being purchased by Gene Posner, the owner of Cream City Broadcasting and others. The WXIX studios moved to a small area at the top of Milwaukee's Schroeder Hotel. From this point on, WXIX was an independent station, and in 1963 changed its call letters to WUHF after another ownership change. Both the WXIX and WUHF calls now reside with Fox affiliates in Newport, Kentucky, and Rochester, New York, respectively.
As an independent station
The WKY Television System, based in Oklahoma City and the forerunner to Gaylord Broadcasting, bought the station in 1966 and changed its call letters to WVTV. The new owners also built new studio facilities at the corner of North 35th Street and Capitol Drive. This started the station on its path to becoming one of the most popular independent stations in the country, with strong local programming such as The Bowling Game, along with a strong slate of syndicated programs such as cartoons, classic off-network sitcoms, more recent sitcoms, drama series, sports, and movies. Like its Gaylord stablemates, channel 18 focused on programming geared to Milwaukee's outer suburbs and rural areas, as opposed to the more urban fare presented by Milwaukee's other stations. Longtime staples on WVTV included Hee Haw, The Lawrence Welk Show as well as syndicated reruns of Green Acres and The Andy Griffith Show. The station also aired All Star Wrestling during the 1970s and 1980s.The station aired the CBS version of The Merv Griffin Show after WISN-TV rejected it. After Griffin was canceled by CBS, WVTV aired The Dick Cavett Show, which had been preempted by WITI; interestingly enough, a majority of ABC shows WITI had passed during its tenure with the network was picked up by WVTV until the secondary arrangement deal between the parties ended in 1972. The station also aired The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson from 1984 to 1988, due to WTMJ-TV being denied permission by NBC to air the program in a later timeslot so that it could air syndicated programs after its late evening newscast.
As cable television became more popular, WVTV became a regional superstation in the mold of sister stations KTVT in Fort Worth, KHTV in Houston and KSTW in Tacoma. At its height, it was available on nearly every cable system in Wisconsin, as well as a few providers in Michigan, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. This resulted in the station rebranding as "Super 18, Wisconsin's Superstation" in 1987. WVTV was also the longtime home of the Milwaukee Brewers, Milwaukee Bucks, Big Ten Conference men's basketball, and area college sports teams. The station was carried on Green Bay area cable providers until June 2007, when WWAZ-TV replaced it for a short time before terminating analog operations the next year and a four-year build-out of digital operations in Milwaukee. Despite its status as one of the strongest independent stations in the country, channel 18 turned down an offer by the fledgling Fox Broadcasting Company for an affiliation in 1986. Most of the smaller markets in WVTV's cable footprints had enough stations to provide a local Fox affiliate at the outset, which made the prospect of WVTV as a multi-market Fox affiliate unattractive to Gaylord. Sister station KSTW passed on the Fox affiliation for Seattle–Tacoma for this reason. The Fox affiliation went to six-year-old upstart WCGV-TV.
WVTV continued to be the leading independent station in the market until Fox came into its own, resulting in a boost in WCGV's ratings. The station's ownership went into a state of flux after Gaylord began easing out of the television business. In 1994, Gaylord entered into a local marketing agreement with WCGV, which was owned by Abry Communications. Although WCGV was the senior partner, the two stations' operations were merged at WVTV's original studio facilities.
WVTV was originally tapped to be a charter affiliate of The WB Television Network along with Gaylord's other independent stations. The new network was due to launch in 1994, but when it was delayed to 1995 instead, Gaylord sued to void the agreement. However, the New World/Fox affiliation deal in 1994 shifted network affiliations in many markets; Gaylord was able to reach an affiliation deal with CBS to switch KSTW and KTVT to the network. Locally, the deal included WITI, which would switch from CBS to Fox in December 1994. After being turned down by WISN-TV and WTMJ-TV, CBS approached WVTV. However, WVTV turned the offer down as well. CBS then aligned itself with then low-profile independent WDJT-TV. When The WB launched in January 1995, Milwaukee became the second-largest market in the country without an affiliate. Milwaukee viewers were forced to watch The WB's programming on cable through Chicago-based WGN-TV, which was then carrying the network nationally. By this time, channel 18 was airing more syndicated talk shows during the day, and aired first-run syndicated programming such as Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys in primetime under the branding "VTV Prime".
On July 24, 1995, Gaylord sold WVTV to Glencairn Ltd. Glencairn had tried to buy WVTV a year earlier, but the sale had fallen through. A few months earlier, Sinclair Broadcast Group had become WCGV's owner as a result of the company's merger with Abry. Glencairn, in turn, was owned by a former Sinclair executive. For all intents and purposes, Sinclair owned both stations even though FCC rules forbade duopolies at the time. Sinclair further circumvented the rules by continuing the LMA.
Affiliation with The WB
WVTV continued to be an independent station for two more years, with The WB pushing for more national distribution beyond the Tribune Company's broadcast stations and WGN-TV's superstation. Sinclair struck a large affiliation deal with The WB for several of the UPN affiliates and independent stations it either owned or controlled on May 19, 1997, an agreement which included WVTV. WVTV finally picked up the WB affiliation the same day and changed its on-air branding to "WB 18"; the following January, WCGV disaffiliated from UPN as a part of the same agreement. With The WB's drive to have stations in other markets take the network and pushing market exclusivity for those stations, Sinclair made the decision to begin winding down carriage agreements with providers outside of the Milwaukee and Green Bay markets, ending WVTV's status as a regional superstation. Sinclair also wanted to push viewership to WCGV, though it soon restored its UPN affiliation in August 1998 due to a ratings plunge and a conciliatory agreement to restore the network between UPN and Sinclair.WVTV finally became wholly owned by Sinclair in 2000, after a long legal battle between Sinclair and Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow/PUSH coalition about the racial issues of one concern holding two broadcast licenses in a market. Jackson argued that Glencairn ownership was making an end-around by passing itself off as a minority-owned company when it was really an arm of Sinclair, and used the LMA to gain control of the station. By this point, however, the FCC had overturned regulations that had disallowed television duopolies, and the sale to Sinclair went through despite these objections.