WUPV

Overview

WUPV is a television station licensed to Ashland, Virginia, United States, broadcasting on channel 65. It serves the Richmond area of central Virginia as an affiliate of The CW and is branded as CW Richmond. The station is owned by Gray Media, formerly Gray Television, alongside Richmond's NBC affiliate WWBT on channel 12 and low-power station WRID-LD on channel 48. WUPV and WWBT share studios on Midlothian Turnpike, U.S. Route 60, in Richmond. WUPV's web presence has been presented through CW Richmond pages and through its sister station's digital platforms.

The station's path to the air was unusually long. It began as a leased-access cable channel carrying religious programming around 1980, spent most of that decade trying to become a broadcast station, and finally signed on on March 9, 1990, as religious station WZXK. It then passed through three network identities in little more than a decade: The WB as WAWB from 1995, UPN under its present WUPV call sign from 1997, and The CW from that network's launch in 2006. Today it also has a technical distinction, serving as one of central Virginia's two ATSC 3.0, or NextGen TV, lighthouse transmitters for the Richmond-Petersburg market.

History

The operation that became WUPV started on cable. Around 1980, Christal Inc., run by James Campana, leased a cable channel in Henrico County and filled it with religious programming. The company later decided to pursue a full broadcast licence and applied for UHF channel 65 at Ashland. Getting the station built took most of the 1980s. Christal had to settle with a competing applicant, and Hanover County refused permission for a tower in that county, forcing the station to build its transmitter site in neighbouring King William County instead.

When the station finally signed on on March 9, 1990, it used the call sign WZXK and was owned by Christal Broadcasting. It was a religious station at first, carrying Christian programmes including nationally distributed church and ministry shows. Over the next few years it added general entertainment in the late afternoon and early evening, moved to twenty-four-hour operation in 1993, and expanded non-religious programming to roughly a third of its schedule, at one point promoting itself as Fun 65. That gradual shift away from an all-religious format set up its move into network affiliation in the middle of the decade, when two new national networks, The WB and UPN, were looking for affiliates in markets such as Richmond.

Network Affiliation

In 1995, Bell Broadcasting bought the station and affiliated it with The WB, changing the call sign to WAWB and branding it WB65. The arrangement lasted two years. In 1997 Bell sold the station to Virginia-based Lockwood Broadcasting, which negotiated to move the UPN affiliation to channel 65 as a primary affiliation from Fox affiliate WRLH-TV, where UPN had been carried secondarily. With that switch the station adopted its current call sign, WUPV. A side effect of the swap was that The WB was left without a full-time outlet in Richmond, and the network's later efforts to develop an additional local station for its programming did not succeed, for legal and technical reasons.

WUPV stayed with UPN until that network closed. When The WB and UPN were replaced by The CW in 2006, WUPV joined the new network at its launch and has been Richmond's CW affiliate since, while WRLH-TV placed the other new service of that season, MyNetworkTV, on a digital subchannel. The CW affiliation survived every subsequent change of the station's ownership and operating partner.

Ownership

After the Lockwood period, the station was sold in 2006 to Southeastern Media Holdings and became a sister station to Richmond CBS affiliate WTVR-TV, then owned by Raycom Media, moving its operations into WTVR's Broad Street studios. In November 2007 Raycom agreed to buy NBC affiliate WWBT from Lincoln Financial Media, closing on April 1, 2008. Because Raycom could not own two of the market's big-four network affiliates, WTVR was marked for divestiture; after a proposed sale to Sinclair was blocked under a Justice Department consent decree, WTVR was swapped to Local TV in March 2009 in exchange for a Birmingham, Alabama station. WUPV's operations moved again, this time into WWBT's facilities, the home it still shares.

In 2011, Southeastern Media Holdings and its stations, including WUPV, were sold to interests controlled by Thomas Henson, whose shares were transferred the same year to American Spirit Media, for $24 million plus the assumption of $50 million in debt. The station continued to be operated alongside WWBT under shared services arrangements with Raycom. The corporate picture simplified when Gray Television and Raycom merged: the cash-and-stock transaction, valued at $3.6 billion and announced on June 25, 2018, was approved on December 20, 2018 and completed on January 2, 2019. WUPV and WWBT both came under Gray, now Gray Media, giving the company a directly owned CW and NBC pairing in Richmond alongside its other Virginia stations.

Programming

WUPV's schedule is built on The CW's prime-time lineup, with syndicated entertainment in daytime, early fringe and late night. Sports have reached Richmond viewers through the station as well: a broadcast agreement with D.C. United of Major League Soccer brought the club's matches, with pregame and postgame coverage, to CW Richmond, with most games on the main 65.1 channel and some weekday matches placed on the Bounce TV subchannel at 65.2. The agreement reflected the club's significant following in the Richmond area despite the team being based in Washington.

In its earlier incarnations the schedule looked very different: all-religious programming as WZXK, then a WB schedule heavy with the network's youth-oriented series and children's blocks as WAWB, then UPN prime time after 1997. Each affiliation change re-sorted the syndicated inventory around the network core, but the station's basic function as Richmond's second entertainment outlet, behind the big-four affiliates, stayed constant.

News Operation

WUPV has carried locally produced news in two forms, both made by partner stations rather than by a large newsroom of its own. On March 5, 2007, it launched a thirty-five-minute weeknight newscast at 10 p.m. produced by WTVR-TV, competing with the established 10 p.m. news on WRLH-TV that WWBT produced. Weekend editions ran from October 2007 for about a year. The WTVR-produced programme was cancelled in November 2008, with high production costs cited, the final weeknight edition airing on November 7.

Under the later WWBT partnership, the position changed. Reference summaries of the station note that it airs one local newscast from the WWBT newsroom, integrating channel 65 into the news operation of its NBC sister station. That model, a single partner-produced programme rather than a full schedule of separate newscasts, matches the station's scale: CW affiliates of its size typically rely on a duopoly partner's newsroom for a limited prime-time or morning presence rather than building a competing news department.

Subchannels

WUPV's standard digital service carries The CW in high definition on 65.1. Its second subchannel is Bounce TV, which the station prepared in September 2011, opening the subchannel on September 16 ahead of Bounce's September 26, 2011 launch as a network aimed at African American audiences with films, series and specials. Listings for the Richmond market also show Grit, the western and action network, on 65.3 and the comedy network Laff on 65.4. Sister low-power station WRID-LD additionally repeats the main channels of WWBT and WUPV within its own multiplex, listing the CW service as 65.6, which improves the stations' reach in the immediate Richmond area.

Studios and Transmitter

WUPV shares studios with WWBT on Midlothian Turnpike, U.S. Route 60, in Richmond, having previously operated from WTVR-TV's Broad Street studios during the period when that station was its partner. Its transmitter stands northeast of Richmond in King William County, about 1.6 miles west of Enfield and near the Hanover County line, the site the station was obliged to use after Hanover County refused its tower application in the 1980s. That location, outside the urban core, was chosen to serve the whole Richmond-Petersburg market from the northeast.

Digital Transition and NextGen TV

WUPV broadcast in analog on UHF channel 65 from 1990 until the national digital transition, and its digital signal used UHF channel 47 in the earlier digital period, with viewers selecting virtual channel 65. The defining recent technical step came on April 11, 2022, when all seven full-power stations in the Richmond-Petersburg market launched NextGen TV broadcasts using the ATSC 3.0 standard. WUPV and public station WCVW were the two stations that converted their transmitters to ATSC 3.0, acting as lighthouse stations: each broadcasts its own programming and the other participating stations' programming in the new format, while every station's services remain available in the existing digital format that current receivers use. The launch, coordinated by BitPath, made Richmond-Petersburg the forty-ninth American market with ATSC 3.0 service at the time.

Market Role and Availability

In the Richmond market, WUPV is the CW affiliate and the entertainment-focused partner in Gray Media's duopoly with WWBT, complementing the NBC station's news strength with network prime time, syndicated programming, occasional sports and one partner-produced newscast. It is available over the air on channel 65, on cable systems in the Richmond area, where listings have placed it at channel 13 in standard and high definition on the main local systems, through satellite and streaming television providers, and in NextGen TV form as one of the market's two ATSC 3.0 hosts. Its history, from a leased-access religious channel that spent a decade reaching the air to a network affiliate helping to introduce a new broadcast standard, gives it an unusually varied record among Virginia television stations.