WSAH

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

WSAH
Bridgeport/Hartford/New Haven, Connecticut/New York, New York
Channels	43 (UHF) analog, 42 (UHF) digital
Affiliations	Shop at Home Jewelry Television
Owner	The E.W. Scripps Company (WSAH License, Inc.) (Sale to Multicultural Television pending)
Founded	1953 (WICC-TV) 1987 (WBCT)
Call letters meaning	"Shop at Home" (one of the station's affiliations)
Former affiliations	ABC (1953-60) DuMont (1953-56?) Community programming (1987-96) Infomercials (1987-99)

WSAH is a television station licensed to Bridgeport, Connecticut in the New York City television market, operating on UHF channel 43, with a digital signal on UHF channel 42. It is owned by The E.W. Scripps Company, and is affiliated with the Shop at Home and Jewelry Television home shopping networks.

[edit] History

WSAH can trace its heritage to March 1953, when WICC-TV (meaning "Industrial Center of Connecticut", referring to Bridgeport [1]) signed on with programming from ABC and DuMont, a month after WKNB-TV signed on. The station was named after its sister AM station. Considering that UHF was rather new at the time and requires an expensive converter, the station was not seen by many.

None of their attempts to gain viewers succeeded -- one of these included a stunt where Bob Crane (who later became the star of Hogan's Heroes) offered $100 to the first caller who calls the station. Amazingly, no one called -- a likely sign that no one was watching WICC.

WICC-TV went off the air in December 1960. Most of the station's programming inventory was destroyed by fire a few months later.

A group of women purchased the license in 1987, who returned the station to the air as WBCT, airing some community programming, along with infomercials and home shopping. In the early 1990s, the station changed its call letters to WHAI-TV, and by 1996, the station was owned by Paxson Communications, who eliminated the community programming.

Original plans called for the station to adopt the Pax network when it launched in 1998 under the WIPX callsign, but those plans were scrapped and the call letters were again changed, this time to WBPT-TV. After a failed sale attempt to Cuchifritos Communications (who planned to institute a Spanish language home shopping service) ([2], [3]) fell through, the station was sold in 1999 to Shop at Home, who installed their programming and the WSAH call letters. ([4], [5]

Azteca America nearly bought the station late in 2000 to serve as their New York City affiliate. [6] Those plans never materialized [7], and the station continues to run Shop at Home, with a brief interruption in 2006 when the network temporarily closed. Since then, WSAH has added an affiliation with Jewelry Television, owned by ACN [8].

On September 26, 2006, Scripps announced that it was selling WSAH along with four other stations (KCNS San Francisco, California, WMFP Boston, Massachusetts, WOAC Canton, Ohio and WRAY-TV Wilson-Raleigh, North Carolina) to Multicultural Television, based in New York City for $170 million. [9] Until Multicultural takes control of the station, channel 43 will continue with its current home shopping programming.

[edit] Reference

• RadioDXer.com. WICC-TV, Channel 43, Bridgeport, CT. Retrieved on October 18, 2005.

[edit] External links

• Query the FCC's TV station database for WSAH