WPVI-TV

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WPVI-TV, channel 6, is an owned-and-operated station of the Walt Disney Company-owned American Broadcasting Company, located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. WPVI has its studios located on the border between Philadelphia and Bala Cynwyd, and its transmitter is located in the Roxborough neighborhood. WPVI's signal covers the Delaware Valley area, comprised of large portions of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware.

History

As WFIL-TV

Philadelphia's second-oldest television station signed on the air on September 13, 1947 as WFIL-TV. It was owned originally by Triangle Publications, publishers of The Philadelphia Inquirer, along with WFIL radio (AM 560 and FM 102.1, now WIOQ).

WFIL radio had been an ABC radio affiliate dating back to ABC's days as the Blue Network. However, WFIL-TV started out as a DuMont affiliate, as ABC hadn't gotten into television yet. When ABC launched its television network on April 19 1948; WFIL-TV became the fledgling network's first affiliate. Ironically, channel 6 joined ABC before the network's first O&O, WJZ-TV in New York City (now WABC-TV) signed on in August. It retained a secondary DuMont affiliation until that network's demise in 1956.

File:Wfil57.jpg
A WFIL-TV logo card, c. 1957.

The WFIL stations were the flagship of the growing communications empire of Walter Annenberg's Triangle Publications, which owned both Philadelphia newspapers (the morning Inquirer and, later, the evening Philadelphia Daily News), periodicals including TV Guide, Seventeen, and the Daily Racing Form, and a broadcasting group that would grow to ten radio and six television stations.

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 WFIL, located at Market and 46th streets. In 1964 Triangle built one of the most advanced broadcast centers in the nation on City (or City Line) Avenue in the Main Line, in a circular building across from rival WCAU-TV. The station still broadcasts from there today, while the original studio was turned over to public broadcaster WHYY-FM and Television.

Channel 6 has a long history of producing local shows. Perhaps its most notable local production was American Bandstand, which began in 1952 from WFIL-TV's original 46th and Market studio before the ABC network picked it up five years later. Other well-known locally-produced shows included Captain Noah and His Magical Ark, Chief Halftown, hosted by the full-blooded Seneca Indian Traynor Ora Halftown and the Larry Ferrari Show, which featured Ferrari playing organ music.

Channel 6 was the first station to sign on from the Roxborough neighborhood. It originally used a 600-foot (180 m) tower, but in 1957 it moved to a new 1,100-foot (340 m) tower which it co-owned with NBC-owned WRCV-TV (channel 3, now KYW-TV). The new tower added much of Delaware and the Lehigh Valley to the station's city-grade coverage.

As WPVI-TV

File:Wpvi70s.jpg
WPVI-TV's first ID card, c. 1971.

In 1968, the Federal Communications Commission barred companies from owning newspapers and broadcast outlets in the same market--the so-called "one to a market" rule. However, the FCC "grandfathered" several existing newspaper and broadcasting clusters in several markets. Triangle approached the FCC for permission to grandfather its cluster of the Inquirer, Daily News and WFIL-AM-FM-TV, but was turned down. As a result, in 1969, one year after the law was made official, Triangle sold the Inquirer and the Daily News to Knight (later Knight-Ridder) Newspapers.

In 1971, the FCC forced Triangle to sell off its broadcasting properties due to protests from Pennsylvania Governor Milton Shapp. Shapp complained that Triangle had used its three Pennsylvania television stations--WFIL-TV, WLYH-TV in Lancaster and WFBG-TV (now WTAJ-TV) in Altoona--in a smear campaign against him.[1] The WFIL stations, along with outlets 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 (i.e., WFIL-AM to LIN Broadcasting and WFIL-FM to Richer Communications, which changed the call letters), and channel 6 changed its call letters to the current WPVI-TV on April 27, 1971.

Despite the ownership change, channel 6 continued preempting ABC programming in favor of locally-produced and syndicated shows. In 1975, when ABC entered the morning news field with AM America, WPVI did not carry it. Nor would channel 6 pick up AM America's successor, Good Morning America, in its entirety for nearly three years, choosing instead to carry its local children's program Captain Noah and His Magical Ark in place of the second hour of GMA. WPVI-TV also did not run other ABC daytime programming, 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 (channel 48) and WTAF-TV (channel 29).

In March 1985, Capital Cities announced it was purchasing the American Broadcasting Company, a move that stunned the broadcast industry since ABC was some four times larger than CapCities at the time. Some have said that CapCities was only able to pull off the deal because WPVI-TV, the company's flagship property, had become very profitable in its own right. However, the merged company almost had to sell off channel 6 due to a large grade B signal overlap with WABC-TV. In the FCC's view, the merger gave the new company a duopoly prohibited by the regulations of the time -- 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 WCBS-TV in New York and WCAU-TV in Philadelphia. The FCC granted the waiver, and when the transaction became final in early 1986, WPVI-TV became an ABC owned-and-operated station. A decade later, the Walt Disney Company purchased Capital Cities/ABC.

Even in the years after WPVI became an ABC-owned station, they continued to pre-empt an hour of ABC daytime programs in favour of other programs. Wildwood, New Jersey-based NBC affiliate WMGM-TV picked up the pre-empted ABC shows until 1987, when they moved back to channel 29, which was now WTXF-TV. The pre-empted programs were usually magazine shows, game shows or reruns of ABC primetime sitcoms. Some leeway was made in the early 1990s, when WPVI was down to pre-empting only the first half-hour the Home Show.

It was also after the CapCities-ABC merger that WPVI encountered infamy: On January 22, 1987, the station partially re-broadcasted the suicide of Pennsylvania state treasurer R. Budd Dwyer on its noon newscast. Dwyer's suicide occurred at a press conference earlier that morning.

In 1997, in a directive from the new Disney ownership, WPVI-TV began carrying the entire ABC network schedule for the first time ever. Unfortunately, it came at the expense of its highly-rated local show, AM/Live (formerly AM Philadelphia), which was shifted to overnights 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.

Today, WPVI carries the entire ABC line-up as well as syndicated programming such as Live with Regis and Kelly and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, both of which are provided by corporate cousin Disney-ABC Domestic Television. In fact, its entire weekday line-up, including syndicated shows, is identical to that of WABC-TV.

A groundbreaking ceremony for a new WPVI studio/headquarters building, directly behind the current studio on ground bought from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, was held on June 12 2007, with completion of the new studios due for spring of 2009. Since 1977, WPVI has also been airing the Pennsylvania Lottery live nighttime television drawings which occur at 6:59 PM ET nightly; since 2002, WPVI has been airing live Powerball drawings at 10:59 P.M. on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Digital television

The station's digital signal is multiplexed:

Digital channels
Subchannel Programming
6.1 WPVI-DT
6.2 WPVI Plus
6.3 Action News Now

Analog-to-digital conversion

After the analog television shutdown scheduled for February 17, 2009 [2], [3] WPVI-TV will return to channel 6 VHF from a high UHF channel; however most stations in VHF-low (channels 2-6) across the country will not be returning to these frequencies. WPVI will be the only VHF-low station in the Philadelphia market, and only big-4 broadcaster on VHF at all in Philly. The FCC has long discouraged the digital allocation on this VHF-low channels for several reasons: higher ambient noise, interference with FM radio, and larger antenna size required for these channels. [4] [5]

News operation

The station is famous for pioneering the Eyewitness News format, which was used by many stations throughout the United States. When WFIL-TV premiered it on April 6, 1970 the format allowed the news program to have more stories than KYW-TV's Action News due to strict time limits on story packages. Within a few months, the station surged to first place for the first time in its history. It had previously been an also-ran behind KYW-TV and WCAU-TV, which was surprising given its newspaper roots.

Channel 6 went back and forth with KYW-TV for first place for most of the 1970s. In 1977, WPVI lured several personalities from its highly successful sister station WKBW-TV in Buffalo, New York. It was enough to carry WPVI to a large lead over KYW-TV in the ratings books later that year. Channel 6 has dominated the ratings for most of the time ever since, winning virtually every time slot. Its dominance has only been seriously challenged twice -- in the 1980s, when WCAU-TV briefly took the lead at 5 p.m.; and in 2001, when WCAU took first place at 11 p.m. for the first time in decades.

The station has used the same theme since 1972, "Move Closer To Your World" by Al Ham. The composition has become as much a part of the Philadelphia consciousness as the Rocky theme and has helped WPVI stay number one in the Delaware Valley for 30 years. The station tried to switch to a fuller, thunderous and authoritative version of the song by the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1997, but switched back to the old version after five days of viewer complaints.

Years of being in the lead have led WPVI to maintain an "if it isn’t broken, don't fix it" mentality. For instance, it has had the same "6" logo since the 1970s; the only significant change coming in 1997 when it began calling itself "6 ABC" and began placing the ABC "dot" logo inside the "6." It has frequently remastered "Part Of Your Life" to make it sound less dated.

File:Easton Flooding WPVI 2006.jpg
Eyewitness News coverage of flooding in Easton, Pennsylvania on June 28, 2006.

In recent years, attempts have been made to modernize the newscasts. The magnet board used for weather forecasts gave way to a video screen in 2000 and a chromakey wall in 2005. On February 13, 2006, Eyewitness News debuted a revamped and fully modernized set which includes a glass etching background of several historical landmarks in Philadelphia positioned behind the anchor desk, shiftable lighting effects and a computerized Accu-Weather center. WPVI introduced a new HD-capable helicopter in February 2006. Live shots from the helicopter, officially named Chopper6 HD, were shown in high definition. Furthermore, on July 23, 2006, starting with the 6:00 p.m. broadcast, Eyewitness News began broadcasting from their studio in full 720p HDTV. The official announcement was made on July 24. All news cameras on Eyewitness News are HD.

Most of WPVI's personalities have been at the station for 10 years; several for 20 years or more. Jim Gardner has been with the station since 1976 and has been main anchor since May 1977, the longest tenure as a main anchor in Philadelphia history. Dave Roberts (joined in 1978) has been the main weatherman since September 1983, following the untimely death of popular weatherman Jim O'Brien in a skydiving accident near Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania. Both Gardner and Roberts came directly from WKBW-TV. Rob Jennings has been weekend anchor since 1981.

As there is no ABC affiliate or local station based in New Jersey, WPVI cooperates with WABC-TV in the production and broadcast of state-wide New Jersey political debates. When the two stations broadcast a state-wide office debate, such as Governor or U. S. Senate, they will pool resources and have anchors or reporters from both stations participate in the debate. Additionally, the two stations cooperate in the gathering of news in New Jersey where their markets overlap; sharing reporters, live trucks and helicopters.

WPVI offers live streaming video on its sub channel (6.3) and website of "Eyewitnes News Now" Powered by Accuweather.com. As of August 2008, Accuweather (located in State College, Pennsylvania) has a new format and design. The new format include a bar that moves to show when the anachors/segments will finish, hourly forecast, it also has removed the current news and traffic from Eyewitness News. which offers live local and national weather as part of The AccuWeather Channel. The format of "Eyewitness News Now" is much like NBC Weather Plus.

Current personalities

Action News
  • Sarah Bloomquist - weekdays at noon, also reporter
  • Jessica Borg - weekend mornings
  • Tamala Edwards - weekday mornings
  • Jim Gardner - weeknights
  • Rob Jennings - weekend evenings
  • Monica Malpass - weeknights
  • Matt O'Donnell - weekday mornings
  • Walter Perez - weekend mornings, also Lehigh Valley reporter
  • Rick Williams - weekdays at Noon and 5PM
Sports
  • Gary Papa - sports director/weeknights
  • Keith Russell - weekends
  • Jamie Apody - weekdays 5:30 pm/reporter
AccuWeather
  • Erica Grow - weekend mornings
  • Adam Joseph (AMS Seal of Approval) - weekend evenings
  • David Murphy (AMS, NWA Seal of Approval) - weekdays mornings & noon
  • Dave Roberts (NWA Seal of Approval) - weeknights
  • Karen Rogers (AMS Seal of Approval) - weekday mornings (also traffic reporter)
  • Cecily Tynan (AMS Seal of Approval) - weeknights
Reporters

Notable alumni

  • Ed O'Brien
  • Scott Palmer
  • Joe Pellegrino
  • Flora Posteraro
  • Elliot Rodriguez
  • Joe Sanchez
  • Hank Sperka
  • Sally Starr
  • George Strait
  • Kristen Sze
  • Mike Strug
  • Rose Tibayan
  • Don Tollefson
  • Joe Torres
  • Abby Van Pelt
  • Chris Wagner
  • Pat Warren
  • Ralph Wenge
  • Lucy Yang

Radio

WPVI can be heard at 87.7 FM, though at a slightly lower volume than other FM stations. This is because the 87.75 MHz frequency is the audio frequency used for channel 6 in System M. This will not work after the DTV transition in 2009.

See also

References

  1. ^ Obituary of Walter Annenberg from Slate
  2. ^ http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-06-1082A2.pdf
  3. ^ CDBS Print
  4. ^ [1]
  5. ^ [2]


External links

Template:Pennsylvania TV Stations

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