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| Channels | |
| Branding | PHL17, PHL17 CW |
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| History | |
First air date | July 17, 1960 |
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Call sign meaning | Philadelphia |
| Technical information[2] | |
Licensing authority | FCC |
| Facility ID | 73879 |
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| HAAT |
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| Transmitter coordinates | 40°2′30.9″N 75°14′21.9″W / 40.041917°N 75.239417°W |
| Links | |
Public license information | |
| Website | phl17 |
WPHL-TV (channel 17) is a television station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, serving as the local outlet for The CW. The station also maintains a secondary affiliation with MyNetworkTV. Owned and operated by The CW's majority owner, Nexstar Media Group, WPHL-TV has studios in the Wynnefield section of West Philadelphia and broadcasts itself and WUVP-DT (channel 65), the area's Univision station, from a tower in the antenna farm at Roxborough.
The first incarnation of channel 17 was a low-profile religious station, WPCA-TV, which started broadcasting July 17, 1960. It was founded by Percy Crawford's Young People's Church of the Air. Crawford died months after starting the station, and it went off the air August 1, 1962. It was purchased by a group led by Aaron Katz and relaunched as WPHL-TV on September 12, 1965. WPHL-TV was one of three independent stations, all on the ultra high frequency (UHF) band, to start in Philadelphia that year, competing with channel 29 (now WTXF-TV) and the original channel 48 (WKBS-TV). The station was merged into the U.S. Communications group, owned by American Viscose Corporation, in 1967 alongside construction permits held by Daniel H. Overmyer; WPHL-TV was the most successful station in the group and the only one not threatened with closure. Channel 17 was a sports broadcaster from the start, airing Philadelphia 76ers basketball from 1965 to 1972 and Philadelphia Phillies baseball from 1971 to 1982.
The Providence Journal Company acquired WPHL-TV in 1978. During its ownership, channel 17 lost the Phillies after Taft Broadcasting, then-owner of channel 29, acquired the team, but it strengthened its competitive position by buying most of WKBS-TV's programming inventory when it liquidated in 1983. A new Taft Broadcasting, formed after the Taft family sold the earlier company and its stations, acquired the station at the end of 1987, with most of channel 29's executives defecting to channel 17. The station became more competitive, but the new Taft Broadcasting was burdened by debt from a leveraged buyout and sold WPHL-TV to Tribune Broadcasting in 1992. In Tribune's first three years of ownership, channel 17 became the home of Phillies baseball once again; affiliated with The WB; and launched its first local newscast, a joint venture with The Philadelphia Inquirer known as Inquirer News Tonight that lasted two years. When the partnership was dissolved at the end of 1996, WPHL took newscast production in-house, but it struggled to find a substantial audience, with Tribune outsourcing news production to WCAU (channel 10) in 2005.
When The WB and UPN merged to form The CW in 2006, WPHL-TV was excluded from the new network and instead affiliated with MyNetworkTV. In 2012, the station switched news providers from WCAU to WPVI-TV (channel 6), and in 2015, it began producing an in-house morning newscast. Nexstar acquired Tribune in 2019 and, after purchasing The CW in 2022, moved its Philadelphia affiliation to WPHL-TV in 2023.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
wphlcwwas invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ "Facility Technical Data for WPHL-TV". Licensing and Management System. Federal Communications Commission.