Jump to content

WHYY-TV

Add links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 68.82.177.144 (talk) at 01:37, 13 June 2009 (→‎Digital television). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

For the former channel 12 in Wilmington, see WVUE (Delaware). {{Infobox broadcast}} may refer to:

{{Template disambiguation}} should never be transcluded in the main namespace.

WHYY-TV channel 12 is the PBS member station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Its main studio and office facility is co-located with sister station WHYY-FM (90.9 MHz.) in Center City Philadelphia. The station also operates a secondary studio in Wilmington, Delaware, its city of license. Both stations share a transmitter, which is located in the Roxborough section of Philadelphia.

WHYY-TV also operates WDPB (channel 64) in Seaford, Delaware, a full-time satellite which serves the Delmarva Peninsula.

History

WHYY-TV signed on for the first time on September 2, 1957, on channel 35. It was the 23rd educational station in the country, and the second in Pennsylvania (WQED-TV in Pittsburgh had signed on three years earlier). It was owned by Metropolitan Philadelphia Educational Radio and Television Corporation. It broadcast from a studio on Chestnut Street in Center City, which had previously been home to WCAU-TV (channel 10).

The station found the going difficult at first, in part because television sets were not required to have UHF tuning capability. Additionally, the Federal Communications Commission had collapsed most of Delaware, the Lehigh Valley and the Jersey Shore into the Philadelphia market, and the channel 35 transmitter was not nearly strong enough to serve this large area.

Then, in 1958, WVUE, a channel 12 station in Wilmington which had lost NBC affiliation to KYW-TV then struggled as an independent, went off the air. WHYY's owners applied for the vacant channel 12 allocation in Wilmington, which was the nearest available VHF allocation to Philadelphia. The FCC granted WHYY's request to move the station to channel 12 in 1963, and WHYY signed on channel 12 for the first time on September 12. It operated from WVUE's old tower in Glassboro, New Jersey.

As part of an agreement with Delaware officials and the FCC, WHYY-TV also opened a studio in Wilmington, and began producing a newscast focused on Delaware issues, "Delaware Tonight." Although it is licensed in Wilmington, WHYY is still a Philadelphia station for all intents and purposes; to this day it identifies as "Wilmington/Philadelphia" on-air. A similar situation exists in New York City; its flagship PBS station, WNET is licensed to Newark, New Jersey.

Later in 1963, WHYY moved its main studio in Philadelphia to the former home of WFIL-TV (channel 6, now WPVI-TV) on 46th and Market streets. In 1979, channel 12 moved to its current home on Independence Mall, first in the old Living History Center museum and theatre (which was also used for Nickelodeon game shows such as Double Dare and the Bill Cosby revival of You Bet Your Life) before it was transformed into their current building in 1999 as part of the redevelopment of the Independence Mall area.

In the late 1970s, WHYY-TV moved its transmitter to the Roxborough tower farm, home to most of Philadelphia's television stations. The new tower provides at least grade B coverage as far west as Lancaster; as far south as Dover, Delaware and as far north as New Brunswick, New Jersey.

In 1984, WHYY bought WDPB and turned it into a full-time satellite of channel 12. WDPB had signed on in 1981.

Controversy erupted in the Summer of 2007 when station CEO Bill Marrazzo was cited by the watchdog group Charity Navigator as the highest paid CEO in all of public broadcasting.

Series produced

WHYY-TV presents four regular TV series for PBS stations:

PBS's Show:

Syndicated TV Programs:

MoneyTrack began in April 2005. These shows are produced by independent companies for WHYY. The station has also developed several TV specials, such as The Great Comet Crash and Trading Women.

Currently, WHYY-TV produces four original programs including the local nightly news show Delaware Tonight, with anchor Nancy Karibjanian broadcasting from WHYY Wilmington studios. This program is produced with funding from the state of Delaware, raising conflict of interest issues about the programs ability to report independently on state government and current officeholders. Other programs include Radio Times on TV, a weekly version of its daily talk show with host Marty Moss-Coane; Experience shorts, about Philadelphia's cultural community; and Flicks, a three-minute movie review by film critic Patrick Stoner. The shorter version of Flicks, Quick Pics, is also shown on many PBS stations around the country. WHYY was also one of the first PBS affiliates to air Doctor Who.

Digital television

The station's digital channel is multiplexed. Its digital broadcast signal is at a low enough power that even those who live in various areas of the City of Philadelphia cannot get it reliably. They likely will not be able to until the DTV transition at midnight on June 12th 2009. [1] [2]

WHYY-DT

WHYY-DT broadcasts on digital channel 50.

Digital channels
Channel Name Programming
12.1 WHYY-DT main WHYY-TV/PBS programming
12.2 WHYY-DT2 Y Arts (arts and cultural programming)
12.3 WHYY-DT3 Y Info (news/information/public affairs)

See also

WHYY-FM

References

  1. ^ http://www.seedship.com/dtv/problems.htm
  2. ^ http://www.phillyblog.com/philly/showpost.php?p=967651&postcount=6
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=WHYY-TV&oldid=296088524"