WFXW (channel 15) 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 ...
in
Greenville, Mississippi
Greenville is a city in and the county seat of Washington County, Mississippi, United States. The population was 34,400 at the 2010 census. It is located in the area of historic cotton plantations and culture known as the Mississippi Delta.
Hi ...
, United States,
owned and operated
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 ...
by
Tri-State Christian Television
Tri-State Christian Television, Inc., doing business as TCT Network and TCT Ministries, is a religious television network in the United States. The network was founded in May 1977 by Garth Coonce and his wife, Tina Coonce.
TCT Network includes tr ...
(TCT). The station's transmitter is located northeast of
Shaw, Mississippi
Shaw is a city in Bolivar and Sunflower counties, Mississippi, United States, located in the Mississippi Delta region. The name was derived from an old Indian tribe northeast of this region. The population was 1,952 at the 2010 census.
History ...
.
From 1980 to 2016, the station broadcast as
CBS
CBS Broadcasting Inc., commonly shortened to CBS, the abbreviation of its former legal name Columbia Broadcasting System, is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the CBS Entertainm ...
affiliate WXVT.
History
Its first broadcast was on November 7, 1980,
under the call sign WXVT. It had been a CBS affiliate for its entire existence. Before this,
WJTV in
Jackson
Jackson may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Jackson (name), including a list of people and fictional characters with the surname or given name
Places
Australia
* Jackson, Queensland, a town in the Maranoa Region
* Jackson North, Qu ...
had served as the default affiliate. The station was originally owned by Big River Broadcasting. Future sister station
WABG-TV
WABG-TV (channel 6) is a television station licensed to Greenwood, Mississippi, United States, serving the Delta area as an affiliate of ABC and Fox. It is owned by Imagicomm Communications alongside two low-power stations: Grenada-licensed N ...
(channel 6, now a dual
ABC
ABC are the first three letters of the Latin script known as the alphabet.
ABC or abc may also refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Broadcasting
* American Broadcasting Company, a commercial U.S. TV broadcaster
** Disney–ABC Television ...
/
Fox
Foxes are small to medium-sized, omnivorous mammals belonging to several genera of the family Canidae. They have a flattened skull, upright, triangular ears, a pointed, slightly upturned snout, and a long bushy tail (or ''brush'').
Twelve sp ...
affiliate) was actually the Delta's original CBS affiliate when it launched back in October 1959. However, a few months later, WJTV complained that WABG was encroaching on its service area. This is because WABG's signal reaches the far northern fringes of the Jackson
market
Market is a term used to describe concepts such as:
*Market (economics), system in which parties engage in transactions according to supply and demand
*Market economy
*Marketplace, a physical marketplace or public market
Geography
*Märket, an ...
. Big River Broadcasting sold the station to Lamco Communications in 1984. Lamco then sold WXVT to a local ownership group in 1991. Saga Communications purchased WXVT in 1999.
On May 4, 2012, an application was filed with the
Federal Communications Commission
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisdiction ...
(FCC) to transfer ownership of WXVT from Saga Communications to H3 Communications. H3 Communications is owned by the adult children of Charles Harker, president of Commonwealth Broadcasting Group, which owns WABG and
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an Television in the United States, American English-language Commercial broadcasting, commercial television network, broadcast television and radio network. The flagship property of the NBC Enterta ...
affiliate
WNBD-LD
WNBD-LD (channel 33) is a low-power television station licensed to Grenada, Mississippi, United States, serving as the NBC affiliate for the Delta area. It is owned by Imagicomm Communications alongside Greenwood-licensed dual ABC/ Fox affi ...
(channel 33). On January 28, 2013, the FCC granted the sale of WXVT, and it was completed two days later. Commonwealth then took over WXVT's operations, effectively bringing all of the Delta's
Big Three network stations under the control of one company.
H3 Communications agreed to sell WXVT to Cala Broadcast Partners for $3.7 million on October 30, 2015;
concurrently, Cala would purchase WABG-TV, WNBD-LD, and
WFXW-LD from Commonwealth Broadcasting Group.
Cala is jointly owned by Brian Brady (who owns several other television stations, mostly under the
Northwest Broadcasting
Northwest Broadcasting, Inc. was a television broadcasting company based in Okemos, Michigan, United States, a suburb of Lansing. The broadcasting group owned or operated twelve television stations in six markets, through subsidiaries such as Broad ...
name) and Jason Wolff (who owns radio and television stations through Frontier Radio Management).
[ On November 30, 2015, Cala assigned its right to purchase WXVT to John Wagner for $100,000.][ The sale was completed on August 1, 2016; on that date, the station went off the air, with Wagner stating in a filing with the FCC that it was looking for new programming.]
The licenses were separated into two on June 26, 2017, with a low-powered CBS affiliate carrying WXVT's former intellectual unit, and a station on channel 15 that was still dark. The latter license changed its call letters to WFXW on July 25. On July 29, 2019, WFXW returned to the air and returned programming from Ion Television to the Greenville– Greenwood market for the first time since 2011 after former affiliate WHCQ-LD
WHCQ-LD, virtual channel 8 (VHF digital channel 9), is a low-powered Antenna TV- affiliated television station licensed to Cleveland, Mississippi, United States. The station is within the Greenwood and Greenville, Mississippi market, which is e ...
(channel 8) dropped the affiliation for MyNetworkTV.
In February 2019, Reuters
Reuters ( ) is a news agency owned by Thomson Reuters Corporation. It employs around 2,500 journalists and 600 photojournalists in about 200 locations worldwide. Reuters is one of the largest news agencies in the world.
The agency was estab ...
reported that Apollo Global Management
Apollo Global Management, Inc. is an American global private-equity firm. It provides investment management and invests in credit, private equity, and real assets. As of March 31, 2022, the company had $512 billion of assets under management, ...
had agreed to acquire the entirety of Brian Brady's television portfolio, which it intends to merge with Cox Television
CMG Media Corporation (doing business as Cox Media Group) is an American media conglomerate principally owned by Apollo Global Management in conjunction with Cox Enterprises, which maintains a 29% minority stake in the company. The company prim ...
(which Apollo is acquiring at the same time) and stations spun off from Nexstar Media Group
Nexstar Media Group, Inc. is an American publicly traded media company with headquarter offices in Irving, Texas; Midtown Manhattan; and Chicago, Illinois. The company is the largest television station owner in the United States, owning 197 te ...
's purchase of Tribune Broadcasting
Tribune Broadcasting Company, LLC was an American media company which operated as a subsidiary of Tribune Media, a media conglomerate based in Chicago, Illinois. The group owned and operated television and radio stations throughout the United Sta ...
, once the purchases are approved by the FCC. In March 2019 filings with the FCC, Apollo confirmed that its newly-formed broadcasting group, Terrier Media, would acquire Northwest Broadcasting, with Brian Brady holding an unspecified minority interest in Terrier. In June 2019, it was announced that Terrier Media would instead operate as Cox Media Group, as Apollo had reached a deal to also acquire Cox's radio and advertising businesses. The transaction was completed on December 17.
Donation to Tri-State Christian Television
On March 9, 2020, it was announced that John Wagner would donate WFXW to Radiant Life Ministries, an affiliate company of Tri-State Christian Television.[WFXW Donation Agreement](_blank)
/ref> The transaction was completed on June 12, making WFXW an 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 the TCT network and the first full-power religious station
Religion is usually defined as a social-cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatural, tra ...
in the Delta area."Consummation Notice"
''CDBS Public Access'', Federal Communications Commission
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisdiction ...
, 15 June 2020, Retrieved 15 June 2020.
On June 26, 2020, WFXW began airing TCT programming on 15.1. As a result, the Ion affiliation was moved to a subchannel of WFXW on 15.2.
Programming
Syndicated programming on the then-WXVT included ''Wheel of Fortune The Wheel of Fortune or ''Rota Fortunae'' has been a concept and metaphor since ancient times referring to the capricious nature of Fate. Wheel of Fortune may also refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Art
* ''The Wheel of Fortune'' (Burne-Jo ...
'', ''Jeopardy!
''Jeopardy!'' is an American game show created by Merv Griffin. The show is a quiz competition that reverses the traditional question-and-answer format of many quiz shows. Rather than being given questions, contestants are instead given genera ...
'', ''Divorce Court
''Divorce Court'' is an American court show that revolves around settling the disputes of couples going through divorces. The show has had four separate runs, all in first-run syndication. Since the debut of the original series in 1957, it is ...
'', and ''Judge Joe Brown
''Judge Joe Brown'' is an American arbitration-based reality court show starring former Shelby County, Tennessee criminal court judge Joseph B. Brown. It premiered on September 14, 1998 and ran through the 2012–13 television season for a ...
''.
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
WFXW (as WXVT) shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 15, on February 17, 2009, the original target date in which full-power television stations were to transition from analog to digital television under federal mandate (which was later pushed back to June 12). The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 15, 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 its 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 15 on digital television receivers.
References
External links
*
{{TV Stations Mississippi
Tri-State Christian Television affiliates
Ion Television affiliates
Defy TV affiliates
TrueReal affiliates
Scripps News affiliates
Television channels and stations established in 1980
FXW
1980 establishments in Mississippi