WFTT-TV (channel 62) is a
religious
Religion is usually defined as a social system, social-cultural system of designated religious behaviour, behaviors and practices, morality, morals, beliefs, worldviews, religious text, texts, sacred site, sanctified places, prophecy, prophecie ...
television station
A television station is a set of equipment managed by a business, organisation or other entity, such as an amateur television (ATV) operator, that transmits video content and audio content via radio waves directly from a transmitter on the earth ...
licensed
A license (or licence) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit).
A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another party (licensee) as an element of an agreeme ...
to
Venice, Florida
Venice is a city in Sarasota County, Florida, United States. The city includes what locals call "Venice Island", a portion of the mainland that is accessed via bridges over the artificially created Intracoastal Waterway. The city is located in Sou ...
, United States, serving the
Tampa Bay area
The Tampa Bay area is a major populated area surrounding Tampa Bay on the west coast of Florida in the United States. It includes the main cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater. It is the 18th largest metropolitan area in the United St ...
. Owned by
Entravision Communications
Entravision Communications Corporation is an American media company based in Santa Monica, California. Entravision primarily caters to the Spanish-speaking Hispanic community and owns television and radio stations and outdoor media, in several of ...
, the station maintains transmitter facilities in
Riverview, Florida
Riverview is an unincorporated census-designated place in Hillsborough County, Florida, United States. It is located south of Brandon. The population was 107,396 in the 2020 census, up from 71,050 in the 2010 census.
Many of Tampa Bay's radio a ...
.
Despite Venice being WFTT-TV's city of license, the station maintains no physical presence there.
History
The station first signed on the air in 1988 as WBHS on channel 50 (a "-TV" suffix was added to the call letters in 1992), serving as the
flagship
A flagship is a vessel used by the commanding officer of a group of naval ships, characteristically a flag officer entitled by custom to fly a distinguishing flag. Used more loosely, it is the lead ship in a fleet of vessels, typically the fi ...
station of the Home Shopping Network (
HSN
HSN, an initialism of its former name Home Shopping Network, is an American free-to-air television network owned by the Qurate Retail Group, which also owns catalog company Cornerstone Brands. Based in the Gateway area of St. Petersburg, Flo ...
). The station was originally owned by HSN's broadcasting arm Silver King Broadcasting. HSN programming was supplemented with locally produced
public affairs and human interest briefs for 4½ minutes each hour, which exceeded the number of hours
independent stations were required to provide local programming (over 12 broadcast hours a week, counting repeats). The Sunday schedule was devoted to children's programming, including 1970s shows such as ''
New Zoo Revue
''New Zoo Revue'' is an American half-hour children's television show that ran in first-run syndication from 1972 to 1977.
Concept
The 196-episode musical comedy-format show conveyed the concepts of cooperation and guidance for living in contempo ...
'', to expose them to a younger audience.
In 1996,
Barry Diller
Barry Charles Diller (born February 2, 1942) is an American businessman. He is Chairman and Senior Executive of IAC and Expedia Group and founded the Fox Broadcasting Company and USA Broadcasting. Diller was inducted into the Television Hall of ...
acquired the Home Shopping Network; two years later, HSN acquired
USA Network
USA Network (simply USA) is an American basic cable television channel owned by the NBCUniversal Television and Streaming division of Comcast's NBCUniversal through NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment. It was originally launched in 1977 as Madison ...
s and renamed the broadcasting group as
USA Broadcasting
USA Broadcasting was an United States of America, American television broadcasting company owned by the veteran entertainment industry executive Barry Diller. This company was the over-the-air broadcasting arm of USA Networks. Before founding US ...
. Plans emerged in the late 1990s to convert WBHS-TV into a general entertainment independent station by 2002, mirroring the local programming-infused format that was already adopted by its stations in cities such as
Atlanta
Atlanta ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the seat of Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia, but its territory falls in both Fulton and DeKalb counties. With a population of 498,715 ...
,
Dallas–Fort Worth and
Miami
Miami ( ), officially the City of Miami, known as "the 305", "The Magic City", and "Gateway to the Americas", is a East Coast of the United States, coastal metropolis and the County seat, county seat of Miami-Dade County, Florida, Miami-Dade C ...
; however, USA Broadcasting (owned by USA Networks) decided to sell its television stations in 2000, before any plans to change the station's format were made.
The Walt Disney Company
The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney (), is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Disney was originally founded on October ...
made a bid to acquire the group (which could have made a partnership with
Scripps-owned
WFTS-TV
WFTS-TV (channel 28), branded as ABC Action News, is a television station licensed to Tampa, Florida, United States, serving the Tampa Bay area as an affiliate of ABC. It is owned by the E.W. Scripps Company alongside Bradenton-licensed Ion Tele ...
, which recently just became the new ABC affiliate for Tampa Bay over 5 years ago at the time), but was outbid by
Spanish-language
Spanish ( or , Castilian) is a Romance languages, Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from colloquial Latin spoken on the Iberian peninsula. Today, it is a world language, global language with more than 500 millio ...
broadcaster
Univision Communications
TelevisaUnivision (formerly known as Univision Communications) is a Mexican-American media company headquartered in New York and Mexico City, which owns the American Spanish language broadcast network Univision. 45% of the company is held by the ...
. WBHS-TV remained with HSN until January 14, 2002, when it became a charter
owned-and-operated station
In the broadcasting industry, an owned-and-operated station (frequently abbreviated as an O&O) usually refers to a television or radio station owned by the network with which it is associated. This distinguishes such a station from an affiliate ...
of Univision's secondary network TeleFutura (which was renamed
UniMás
UniMás (, stylized as ''UNIMÁS'', and originally known as TeleFutura from its launch on January 14, 2002, to January 6, 2013) is an American Spanish free-to-air television network owned by TelevisaUnivision. The network's programming, which is ...
in January 2013) and changed its call letters to WFTT.
On December 4, 2017, as part of a channel swap made by Entravision Communications, WFTT and sister station
WVEA swapped channel numbers, with WFTT moving from digital channel 47 and virtual channel 50 to digital channel 25 and virtual channel 62.
On October 13, 2021, Univision announced it would take over operation of WVEA, as well as
Orlando
Orlando () is a city in the U.S. state of Florida and is the county seat of Orange County. In Central Florida, it is the center of the Orlando metropolitan area, which had a population of 2,509,831, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures rele ...
Univision affiliate
WVEN-TV
WVEN-TV (channel 43) is a television station licensed to Melbourne, Florida, United States, broadcasting the Spanish-language Univision network to the Orlando area. It is owned and operated by TelevisaUnivision alongside low-power, Class A Uni ...
, effective January 1, 2022, coinciding with the end of licensing agreements on December 31, 2021, effectively ending WFTT's UniMás affiliation.
Technical information
Subchannels
The station's digital signal is
multiplexed
In telecommunications and computer networking, multiplexing (sometimes contracted to muxing) is a method by which multiple analog or digital signals are combined into one signal over a shared medium. The aim is to share a scarce resource - a ...
:
Analog-to-digital conversion
WFTT-TV shut down its analog signal, over
UHF channel 50, on June 12, 2009, as part of the
federally mandated transition from analog to digital television.
[List of Digital Full-Power Stations](_blank)
/ref> The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 47, using PSIP
The Program and System Information Protocol (PSIP) is the MPEG (a video and audio industry group) and privately defined program-specific information originally defined by General Instrument for the DigiCipher 2 system and later extended for the AT ...
to display WFTT-TV's virtual channel
In most telecommunications organizations, a virtual channel is a method of remapping the ''program number'' as used in H.222 Program Association Tables and Program Mapping Tables to a channel number that can be entered via digits on a receiver's ...
as 50 on digital television receivers.
References
External links
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wftt-Dt
Television channels and stations established in 1988
FTT-TV
Religious television stations in the United States
LATV affiliates
Comet (TV network) affiliates
Charge! (TV network) affiliates
Entravision Communications stations
1988 establishments in Florida
Venice, Florida