WDSI
WDSI, known by its licence name WDSI-TV and broadcasting on channel 61, is a television station in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the United States. It is owned by New Age Media and operated by Sinclair Broadcast Group, alongside ABC and Fox affiliate WTVC (channel 9) and CW affiliate WFLI-TV (channel 53), with which it shares studios on Benton Drive in Chattanooga. Its transmitter is located on Signal Mountain, in the town of Walden. The station's primary channel is now affiliated with True Crime Network, with Comet on its second subchannel.
That present identity is the latest of several. WDSI began in 1972 as WRIP-TV, an independent station, became WDSI in 1983, and served as Chattanooga's Fox affiliate for twenty-nine years, from 1986 to 2015, the period for which it is still best remembered as Fox 61. When Sinclair acquired the station's programming assets in 2015, the Fox schedule moved to a subchannel of WTVC, and channel 61 continued with multicast entertainment networks, first This TV and later True Crime Network. A note on dates is necessary for readers who know the station as a Fox affiliate: Fox programming has not aired on WDSI itself since October 31, 2015.
WRIP-TV: the all-movie independent
The station began broadcasting on January 24, 1972, as WRIP-TV, on UHF channel 61. It was Tennessee's second independent station, and it holds a particular distinction: it is the oldest television station in Tennessee in continuous operation never to have held an affiliation with any of the big three networks, ABC, CBS or NBC. Its owner was Jay Sadow, a local operator, and its means were modest.
At first, WRIP was positioned as an all-movie station, filling most of its broadcast day with older films from the 1930s to the early 1960s, together with theatrical cartoons and shorts such as the Little Rascals, the Three Stooges and Looney Tunes. The station was initially on the air for about twelve hours a day, signing on at noon; by the summer of 1972 it had expanded to about nineteen hours a day, signing on at 7 a.m. In the course of 1973, it gradually shifted towards a more conventional independent schedule, still with a low-budget approach.
Financial struggles on UHF
The station's early years were plagued by financial problems, for reasons that were structural rather than managerial. It was a UHF station on a very high channel number serving a small market in mountainous terrain. In the analog era, UHF stations, particularly those high on the dial, often could not deliver a good picture more than about 30 miles away in rugged country, and Chattanooga's ridges and valleys, including Signal Mountain, where its transmitter sits, made reception especially uneven. The station was also losing money because it had overspent on the movie packages that made up its schedule, and as a locally owned outlet it had no parent company to fund other programming investments.
The turnaround, when it came, was gradual. During the late 1970s and into the 1980s the schedule broadened beyond film packages into the standard independent mix of syndicated series, religious programming in some hours and mainstream entertainment, and the station's position slowly strengthened.
Becoming WDSI
In 1983, the station changed its call sign from WRIP-TV to WDSI-TV; the FCC call sign record dates the change to July 4, 1983. The station's branding at the time played on the new letters with the invitation to watch what we're doing now. In a measure of how the UHF reception problem still shaped the business, the station gave away UHF antennas free of charge, available for collection at local convenience stores, so that households could watch channel 61 at a time when many homes in the Chattanooga area were still not wired for cable.
By the end of the decade the strategy had worked to a degree few would have predicted from its first years: contemporary accounts describe the station as becoming one of the strongest independent stations in Tennessee, the opposite of its condition only a few years before.
The Fox years, 1986 to 2015
In 1986, WDSI became a charter-era affiliate of the new Fox network, beginning with Fox's first programme, The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers. The Fox affiliation, which would last twenty-nine years, transformed the station from a struggling independent into the market's established fourth service, branded as Fox 61. Fox prime time and, from 1994, Fox's National Football League coverage gave channel 61 a national identity it had never had as an independent.
In 1993, the station was sold to Pegasus Communications. As the industry's economics changed, classic sitcoms and movies on the schedule were gradually replaced by more modern talk and reality programmes and court shows, and cartoons left the schedule between 1999 and 2002 in favour of first-run reality programming. The station also took on a secondary affiliation with UPN in 2001, carrying the network late at night after WFLI-TV dropped it, until WYHB-LP became the UPN affiliate the following year. WDSI began digital broadcasting on UHF channel 40 in 2002, and on September 5, 2006, it launched MyNetworkTV, Fox's new sister programming service, on a second digital subchannel, which was not added to local digital cable systems until March 2009.
News on channel 61
WDSI's news history is a story of partnerships and one period of independence. WTVC, the market's ABC affiliate, produced a prime-time newscast for the station under a news share agreement beginning in 1996, supplying its own meteorologists, sports anchors and reporters while WDSI used its own news anchors from its separate studios. In 2000, the operation expanded into a full local news department of WDSI's own, with local news on weekday mornings, at 4 p.m. on weekday afternoons and every night at 10 p.m., competing directly with the market's big three outlets.
The experiment ended in 2004. WDSI closed its news department that year, eliminating about thirty jobs; its general manager explained publicly that the local news audience was not large enough to be divided among four news-producing stations. From March 2004, the 10 p.m. newscast was again produced by WTVC under a renewed outsourcing arrangement, while the station's own final original newscasts were replaced in their time periods by syndicated programming. The WTVC-produced arrangement continued until Sinclair and WTVC took over the WDSI programme schedule in the autumn of 2015.
From Pegasus to New Age Media
Pegasus Communications filed for bankruptcy in 2004, and after that process, most of its stations, including WDSI, were sold to the investment group CP Media, LLC, in a transaction announced on January 4, 2007, and completed on March 31 of that year. CP Media formed New Age Media as the parent company for the former Pegasus stations, and New Age remains the station's licence owner today. Under New Age, WDSI continued as Fox 61, operated in tandem with Cleveland-licensed WFLI-TV, the market's CW affiliate.
WDSI also completed its digital transition during this period on an early schedule: it shut down its analog signal on channel 61 on January 19, 2008, ahead of the national 2009 deadline, with its digital signal continuing on channel 40 and receivers displaying its virtual channel as 61, one of the high-band UHF numbers removed from broadcasting use by the transition.
2015: Fox moves to WTVC
In September 2015, Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner of WTVC, purchased the non-license assets, that is, the programming and affiliation assets, of WDSI-TV and WFLI-TV from New Age Media. New Age continued to own the WDSI licence, but Sinclair acquired control of what the station broadcast. During a transition completed on October 31, 2015, WTVC's second digital subchannel simulcast WDSI. On that date, coinciding with Sinclair's launch of its Comet network, the Fox schedule and the Fox 61 identity moved permanently to WTVC-DT2 under the name Fox Chattanooga.
In the same shuffle, This TV, which had been carried on WTVC-DT2, moved to WDSI's main channel; Comet launched on WDSI-DT2; and MyNetworkTV moved from WDSI to WFLI-DT2. Cable, satellite and EPB Fiber Optics viewers saw no change in channel positions, because WTVC-DT2 simply took over the slots formerly occupied by WDSI's main signal. Only over-the-air viewers experienced the change directly, as channel 61 began a new life as a multicast station.
WDSI today
After 2015, WDSI's main channel carried This TV, an affiliation it held until 2022; its primary service is now True Crime Network, with Sinclair's Comet network on channel 61.2. The station broadcasts digitally on UHF channel 14, following the spectrum repack, displayed as virtual channel 61, with an effective radiated power of 120 kW from Signal Mountain, under FCC facility ID 71353. It continues to be owned by New Age Media of Tennessee License, LLC, and operated by Sinclair from the Benton Drive studios it shares with WTVC and WFLI.
Local programming was also part of the station's Fox-era identity; WDSI produced programmes including Around the Region and local sports coverage of Chattanooga basketball and football, along with business and community shows. Those productions belong to its history as a full-service affiliate, a role that ended with the 2015 transaction, even though the channel 61 licence itself has now been on the air, under two call signs and a succession of owners, for more than half a century.
