WUPA

WUPA (channel 69) is a television station in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, affiliated with The CW. The station is owned by the CBS News and Stations group and maintains studios on Northeast Expressway ( I-85) in unincorporated DeKalb County (with an Atlanta mailing address); its transmitter is located near Shepherds Lane and Arnold Avenue in the Woodland Hills section of northeastern Atlanta (near North Druid Hills).

Channel 69 in Atlanta first began broadcasting in 1981 as WVEU. Years of technical issues provoked by interference to mobile radio users and consequent limitations on the station's operating hours and signal strength contributed to the failure of subscription television (STV) and a music video service that operated the station. WVEU's local founders sold the station to CBS in 1994 at a time when CBS needed to find a new affiliate in Atlanta, but the network was able to negotiate to affiliate with another, more built-up station instead. WVEU became an affiliate of UPN and was then sold to the Paramount Stations Group, which substantially improved the station's programming and ratings in the years that followed before UPN was replaced with The CW in 2006. In addition to a hybrid local/national 10 p.m. newscast, WUPA is the preseason television home of Atlanta Falcons football.

History

Construction, land mobile dispute, and STV years (1981–1984)

In 1978, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) received two applications for new television stations to use channel 69 in Atlanta; on August 19, 1980, the final decision was given to award it to a consortium of Atlanta-based investors known as Broadcast Corporation of Georgia (BCG), which proposed a hybrid operation consisting of daytime ad-supported programming and a subscription television (STV) service in evening hours. The antenna atop the Peachtree Plaza Hotel from which channel 69 would radiate had been hoisted into place in mid-August, days before the license decision was publicized. The subscription programming would be supplied under the Superstar TV name by Subscription Television of Greater Atlanta, a consortium originally reported to be co-owned by Clint Murchison—who had subscription television holdings in other cities, including the Super TV service in the Washington, D.C., and Baltimore markets—and Atlanta electronics manufacturer Dynacom, which would produce the decoders subscribers would need to view Superstar programming. In actuality, the owner was not Clint Murchison but Clyde A. Murchison, whom a 1982 article in ''The Atlanta Constitution'' described as Clint's great-nephew.

WVEU began broadcasting on August 22, 1981. However, a planned full launch on October 1 had to be scuttled because of interference the station's broadcasts on channel 69—at the top of the TV band, 800 to 806 MHz—were generating to two-way land mobile radio transmissions. Further, the station had planned to fill daytime hours with programming from a business news service known as The Market Report, which ran into financial difficulties and was unable to start on time. Superstar TV was able to begin operating before the end of the year, with an official kickoff held on January 8, 1982, but WVEU was still required to shut down until 7 p.m. on weekday evenings, essentially leaving it without any commercial, non-STV programming.

The two-way radio dispute continued to loom large over every facet of WVEU's operations for several years, as the station subsisted on production contracts. In June 1983, the FCC ruled that the station could begin operating at 50 percent power before 7 p.m. if it paid an estimated $250,000 to relocate all of the land mobile users affected by interference. However, these users protested the decision and filed for reconsideration with the commission. In February 1984, the FCC ordered the station to engage the users or pay them to relocate on penalty of losing the provisional program test authority under which WVEU had operated since 1981. While the dispute was resolved by July 1984, when the FCC granted a full license to BCG, the issue had doomed Superstar TV, which filed for bankruptcy in April 1983 and made its last broadcasts on the morning of July 23 with fewer than 3,000 subscribers.

The independent years (1984–1995)

To replace Superstar TV, WVEU signed an operating agreement with VideoMusic Channel, which had broadcast music videos on Atlanta-area cable systems, to program nearly all of channel 69's airtime. The station brought the programming in-house in August 1984 before eventually canceling it altogether and replacing it with syndicated shows and reruns because, it learned, music videos were not very "salable" to advertisers. That same year, negotiations were held and an initial agreement reached to sell the station to the RBP Corporation of Massachusetts, but no transaction was consummated.

The station also made its first entry into the television sports market, airing what was to be a package of 30 Atlanta Hawks NBA games in the 1984–85 season, with John Sterling as the play-by-play announcer. This package was whittled down to 19 games because of insufficient advertiser interest. A new 20-game package was carried in the following season, this time with the Hawks selling the advertising time; the Hawks later added a game at The Omni that sold out, their first home telecast in two years.

Through the mid-1990s, WVEU became Atlanta's television station of last resort while a stabilizing WATL (channel 36) and a growing WGNX (channel 46) became the city's primary local independents. It was the city's "quicker picker-upper", constantly airing shows that the local network affiliates passed on. These included CBS's morning news program (under the titles of the ''CBS Morning News'', ''The Morning Program'', and '' CBS This Morning'') from 1986 through 1994 and its late night programming, as well as numerous preempted network sports telecasts that the local affiliates could not air due to scheduling conflicts. Beyond displaced network programs, WVEU featured an eclectic mix, a function of being what ''Business Atlanta'' writer Russell Shaw called the "poor cousin" of Atlanta independent television. There were telecasts of martial arts movies under the banner ''Black Belt Theater'' and later hosted by Morgus the Magnificent, a character first introduced decades prior in Detroit and New Orleans