History
It was Peoria's second television station signing-on as WTVH-TV on October 20, 1953. The station was owned-and-operated by Hilltop Broadcasting which was co-owned by the Peoria Journal Star. Its first studios were on North Madison Street in Downtown Peoria. Originally broadcasting an analog signal on VHF channel 8, it was a primary CBS affiliate but also carried shows from ABC and DuMont. The latter ceased operations in 1955 and WTVH lost CBS when WMBD-TV began broadcasting.
The Metropolitan Broadcasting Corporation, later known as Metromedia, purchased the station in 1959. Four years later, WTVH was bumped down to UHF channel 19 so that a third commercial VHF station could sign-on in the Quad Cities using that channel (the new station, WQAD-TV, is also an ABC affiliate). In 1965, it was sold to the owners of WIRL-AM 1290 who changed the call sign to WIRL-TV. It became WRAU-TV in 1973 and adopted its present calls of WHOI in 1985. The call sign WTVH was picked up by a channel in Syracuse, New York around 1976.
In 1987, WHOI came under the ownership of Adams Communications following a merger with its previous owner, Forward Communications. The station was sold to Brissette Broadcasting in 1991 then to Benedek Broadcasting in 1996. When Benedek merged with Gray Television in 2002 following a Chapter 11 bankruptcy, WHOI was spun off to Chelsey Broadcasting.
Starting in 1998, it began to run a cable-only WB affiliate. Known by the fictional call sign "WBPE", it was on channel 4 on most cable systems in the area. In April 2004, WHOI and KHQA-TV in the Hannibal, Missouri/Quincy, Illinois media market became two of the founding stations of current owner Barrington Broadcasting. On September 18, 2006, when The WB and UPN merged to create The CW, "WBPE" became part of The CW Plus which is a similar operation to The WB 100+. WHOI's digital signal added a new second digital subchannel to simulcast this programming to offer non-cable subscribers access to The CW. The channel then began to use WHOI-DT2 as its official calls.
On March 2, 2009, it was announced that the operations of WHOI and its CW subchannel would be taken over by WEEK-TV through joint sales and shared services agreements. Sixteen employees were transferred to WEEK-TV but as many as thirty were laid-off immediately while WHOI moved to that channel's studios. This left the five full-power commercial stations in the market operated by two entities. The WHOI and CW subchannel websites were immediately changed to redirects to WEEK-TV's web address. As part of the agreement, Granite-owned CBS affiliate WTVH (which is the oldest television station in Syracuse) was folded into Barrington's NBC affiliate WSTM-TV and low-powered CW affiliate WSTQ-LP in a similar way on the same day.
On June 12, WHOI remained on channel 19 when the analog to digital conversion was completed with the "WHOI" calls being transferred from the now-defunct analog channel 19 to the new digital channel 19 and the "WHOI-DT" call sign from the pre-transition digital channel 40 being permanently discontinued. However, the PSIP identifier still identifies the station's main channel on 19.1 as "WHOI-DT".
Read more about this topic: WHOI (TV)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I am not a literary man.... I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.”
—J.A.H. (James Augustus Henry)
“The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)