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WPXD-TV (channel 31) is a television station licensed to Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States, serving as the Ion Television affiliate for the Detroit area. Owned by Inyo Broadcast Holdings, the station maintains studios and transmitter facilities on West 11 Mile Road in Southfield, Michigan.

History

In 1973, Ann Arbor resident Gershom Morningstar, through his Wolverine Morningstar Broadcasting Company, petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to allocate UHF channel 31 to the city. The company then applied for and received a construction permit to build a station on the newly assigned channel, which would be the first since WPAG-TV broadcast in the 1950s. Morningstar believed that the regional coverage of his proposed new station would make it a major outlet, estimating it would cover 80 percent of Michigan's population, with more people than the Philadelphia television market—the nation's fourth largest. In addition to Morningstar, 14 other residents of Washtenaw County and a local bank were involved. The station received the call sign WRHT, but design changes delayed construction of a tower.

FCC delays frustrated Morningstar and delayed construction of channel 31. In February 1979, the commission gave Morningstar an order: sell the construction permit to a new firm within 45 days or lose it. At the end of the period, Southern Satellite of Tulsa, Oklahoma, swooped in to buy the unbuilt WRHT. The company proposed to operate as a hybrid: regular ad-supported commercial programming during the day and subscription television (STV) to paying customers at night, the latter to be programmed by Wometco Home Theater. By October, Southern Satellite had instead decided to program the STV service itself.

Southern Satellite was approved to obtain the construction permit on November 28, 1979; it announced it would build the station's transmitter at the same site proposed by Wolverine Morningstar, in Lyndon Township along M-52. The FCC granted permission for the subscription service several months later, and by October, construction was in progress. By that time, the name of the subscription service was announced as In-Home Theater, and Southern Satellite had changed its name to Satellite Syndicated Systems (SSS). Kip Farmer, WRHT's first general manager, praised the preparatory work done by Morningstar for accelerating the process of starting the station.

As the station signed on, SSS applied to change the call sign from WRHT to WIHT. WRHT signed on the air on January 13, 1981, originally operating as an independent station.

During the day, WIHT initially offered a mostly low-budget mix of programming highlighted by content from SSS's Satellite Program Network as well as syndicated shows from the Christian Broadcasting Network. Some of the station's local program productions, such as Michigan Press Box drew on the station's location near the University of Michigan; others included public affairs and interview shows Tavi and This Week. In May 1982, most of the non-local ad-supported programming was dropped and replaced with the Financial News Network (FNN).

At night, channel 31 offered its namesake service, In-Home Theater (IT). This movie service—which in turn contracted with SelecTV—cost $22.95 a month, with an extra $3.95 monthly charge for late-night adult movies. The FNN coverage lasted only a short time. The next month, the FCC abolished the so-called "28-hour rule"—which required stations to provide a minimum of, on average, four hours a day of non-subscription programming. At that time, the service had 14,000 subscribers, well behind the 61,000 of its main competitor, ON TV on Detroit's WXON (channel 20). SSS responded by devoting the vast majority of channel 31's airtime to IT; previously, IT had aired for 14 hours a day. The move also served as an economy measure, as by 1983 the station had 35 full-time employees instead of 80 and could break even with fewer IT subscribers. The station had just one hour a week of local programming, part of the station's six-hour Sunday block of unscrambled programs.

WIHT's main subscription TV competitor, ON TV, left Detroit on March 31, 1983, citing falling subscriber figures, competition from IT and other services, and restricted airtime on WXON. At that time, subscribership to IT was still holding steady at 15,000.

On November 1, 1985, IT ceased broadcasting as cable penetration in the Ann Arbor area rose and subscriptions slowly declined, though the service still had 12,000 paying customers. Once more, SSS programmed the station as an ad-supported independent largely reliant on the Satellite Program Network. The station had little local programming, and viewership was initially low because Ann Arbor's cable system did not offer it. This changed on May 1, 1986, when Toledo, Ohio, public TV station WGTE-TV was removed to make way for channel 31. After a short experiment with locally produced home shopping programming, the station debuted a new local talk show, The Heart of the Matter, in early 1987. During this time, WIHT was one of a handful of broadcast stations to air Electra, a teletext service that Tempo Enterprises (the renamed SSS) jointly owned with Taft Broadcasting.

Home shopping

Tempo Enterprises dropped most of WIHT's existing programming on September 21, 1987, to carry the Home Shopping Network (HSN), an effort to boost the station's middling revenue performance. This led Ann Arbor's cable system, Columbia Cable, to remove WIHT from its lineup in favor of The Discovery Channel.

In 1988, Tempo Enterprises was acquired by Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), a major cable system operator. TCI owned cable systems within WIHT's coverage area and could not retain the television station under FCC rules. Tempo divested channel 31 to FAB Communications—owned by Fred Blencowe, a member of the Tempo board of directors—which in turn sold WIHT to Blackstar Enterprises for $4.35 million. Blackstar was owned by John E. Oxendine, a Black entrepreneur from Washington, D.C. The company was no stranger to home shopping; HSN owned 45 percent of its equity, and it ran stations with the format in Florida and Oregon. To match those stations—WBSF-TV and KBSP-TV—Blackstar changed WIHT's call sign to WBSX when it finalized the sale on July 11, 1989.

Pax, i, and Ion

Paxson Communications Corporation, the predecessor to Ion Media, acquired WBSX-TV from Blackstar for $35 million in 1997. Paxson owned Infomall TV, an all-infomercial television network. To acquire WBSX-TV, Paxson had to sell an overlapping station in Battle Creek, WJUE-TV. As Paxson converted its Infomall TV stations to the new Pax network on August 31, 1998, the station changed its call sign to WPXD-TV. It also began operating a translator in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, to reach areas of Metro Detroit unserved by the main Ann Arbor signal.

In 2001, Paxson Communications entered into a joint sales agreement with Post-Newsweek Stations, owner of Detroit NBC affiliate WDIV-TV. Under the deal, which also covered two other markets, WDIV sold advertising for WPXD and offered the station replays of its newscasts. After changing its name from Pax to i: Independent Television in 2005, the network became known as Ion Television in 2007.

The E. W. Scripps Company acquired Ion Media for $2.65 billion in 2020. As it already owned WXYZ-TV and WMYD in the Detroit market, it could not keep WPXD-TV. Twenty-three stations in such positions were sold to Inyo Broadcast Holdings in a transaction that closed at the start of 2021.

Technical information

Subchannels

The station's signal is multiplexed:

Analog-to-digital conversion

During October 2008, the Federal Communications Commission accepted WPXD-TV's petition to move its digital signal to channel 19 on February 17, 2009, broadcasting at 1,000 kW from the Southfield transmitter tower used by WKBD-TV (channel 50), vastly increasing its signal coverage in Metro Detroit and Windsor. However, on March 20, 2009, the FCC and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) denied the application to move the channel 19 allocation from Ann Arbor to Detroit and to move its transmitter to Southfield, in order to protect CKXT-DT-2 in London, Ontario, which also broadcast on channel 19 (the potential co-channel interference issued would later be rendered moot as CKXT permanently shut down on November 1, 2011). Due to the Canadian government rejecting the channel relocation, WPXD remained on UHF channel 31.

WPXD-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 31, on February 17, 2009, the original target date for full-power television stations in the United States to transition from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate (which Congress had moved the previous month to June 12). The station's digital signal moved from its pre-transition UHF channel 33 to UHF channel 50 (which was previously occupied by the analog signal of WKBD-TV) for post-transition operations on July 24, 2012. Digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 31. As a result, WPXD and WMYD were the only commercial television stations in the Detroit market to terminate their analog signals before June 12, the date which Congress chose to reschedule the completion of the digital transition.

The original channel 33 digital transmitter operated at a relatively low wattage (110 kW), and originated from the same tower as WPXD's analog signal in Lyndon Township; this resulted in interference with low-power Class A station W33BY, which also broadcast on UHF channel 33. On or about May 11, 2009, a new application to modify a digital allotment was filed by the FCC, to allow WPXD to broadcast its digital signal on channel 50 from the Southfield tower at a radiated power of 345 kW, which was approved by the FCC and the CRTC. On October 21, 2009, the FCC granted a construction permit for WPXD's new digital facilities in Southfield; the station estimated that the stronger signal would reach an additional 1.8 million viewers.

On January 31, 2012, the station began testing its new transmitter in Southfield, keeping its UHF 31 transmitter in Chelsea operational as a temporary fill-in transmitter. The channel 50 transmitter abruptly ended transmissions less than two days later, leaving only its channel 31 digital signal and its analog translator W48AV. On May 23, 2012, the station again turned on its transmitter on UHF channel 50, but ceased transmission the following day. On July 24, 2012, WPXD began permanent digital transmitter operations in Southfield, broadcasting on UHF channel 50. The transmitter in Chelsea remained active until noon on August 20, 2012, though starting on the morning of August 6, 2012, the Chelsea transmitter replaced normal programming with SMPTE color bars and a scrolling message regarding this "technical change", noting for viewers to re-scan their converter boxes and sets and aim their antennas towards Southfield. The former Lyndon Township site was later repurposed as a transmitter site for former MyNetworkTV affiliate WHTV in Lansing, which ceased operations on August 31, 2017.

Former translator

WPXD's programming was previously repeated on low-power translator station W48AV (channel 48) in St. Clair Shores. The translator was originally designed to bring channel 31's programming to the immediate Detroit area, in areas where the main channel 31 signal had poor, or even no, reception. However, W48AV would experience some co-channel interference from WMNT-CA in Toledo, Ohio, which also broadcasts on UHF channel 48.

On December 29, 2008, Paxson Communications/Ion Media had requested their construction permit to flash-cut to digital on UHF 48 be cancelled (and was approved as submitted) by the FCC. This would later be replaced with an application for displacement to UHF 25 (and to convert to digital operations there). This application was granted on July 11, 2012.

On December 15, 2014, Ion reached a deal to donate W48AV to Word of God Fellowship, parent company of the Daystar network. W48AV currently has an application to flash-cut to digital. Ion chose to part with W48AV, as it was made redundant following the relocation of WPXD's transmitter from Lyndon Township to Southfield. As part of the transaction, Daystar requested a special temporary authority for it to relocate to UHF 23 (the channel of its currently-operating station, WUDT-LD) to operate W48AV-D as a Daystar station; this was granted. W48AV was the last remaining American television station in the greater Detroit area to convert to digital. On November 18, 2015, W48AV's license was cancelled with the station being merged back into WUDT-LD, with only the PSIP of "W48AV 48.1" remaining as any trace of the station's existence for a brief period, before it reverted to using WUDT-LD's call-letters and PSIP (WUDT 23.1).

See also

• Media in Detroit

References

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• 1981 establishments in Michigan
• Companies based in Southfield, Michigan
• Court TV affiliates
• Defy TV affiliates
• Get (TV network) affiliates
• Grit (TV network) affiliates
• Ion Television affiliates
• Mass media in Ann Arbor, Michigan
• Scripps News affiliates
• Television channels and stations established in 1981
• Television stations in Detroit