Bay City Television - History - Becoming "San Diego 6"

Becoming "San Diego 6"

During a seminar by Sam Zell on March 25, 2008, it was revealed that Tribune Broadcasting (which Zell acquired the previous year as part of his takeover of corporate parent Tribune Company) had signed an affiliation agreement with Fox for its San Diego CW affiliate KSWB-TV. Fox cited concerns with having its programming airing on a Mexican-licensed station, even though XETV had been with Fox since the network's inception and had broadcast its programming almost entirely in English for over half a century. This caught XETV station management off guard as officials were unaware about the pending affiliation switch until the announcement was made public.

The fate of both XETV and the CW affiliation for the San Diego market remained unclear until July 2, 2008, when channel 6 announced that it had signed an affiliation agreement with The CW. The station began dropping on-air references to Fox just over two weeks later on July 19, 2008, rebranding itself as "San Diego 6". The affiliation swap officially took place on August 1, 2008, ending XETV-TV's 22-year association with Fox – with channel 6 joining The CW, while the Fox affiliation moved over to KSWB. XETV, upon switching networks, replaced KSWB-TV on DirecTV as a default affiliate in the few areas of the western United States where a CW-affiliated station is not receivable over-the-air or through cable television (DirecTV identifies XETV as "CW-W" and carries its programs in standard definition only). The San Diego 6 logo incorporates a miniature CW logo in its top left corner for news programming, otherwise setting it off to the right in proportionate size; instead of being the standard green color, the CW logo is colored a bright blue in non-news advertising to match the station logo's blue, gold and white color scheme.

On March 5, 2012, XETV became the new Tijuana affiliate for Televisa's Canal 5, which the station carried on analog channel 6 and digital subchannel 6.2 in standard definition; XHBJ-TV switched its affiliation from Canal 5 to Galavisión on that same date – Canal 5 replaced XETV's English-language programming on its analog signal, in order to serve Spanish-speaking viewers in Tijuana that did not have digital TV sets or converter boxes prior to the Tijuana market's 2013 transition to digital television. The affiliation switch coincided with the commencement of digital multicasting on Televisa's Tijuana stations.

On April 29, 2013, XETV celebrated its 60th anniversary of broadcasting. The station's morning newscast provided special coverage of the festivities, including separate proclamations of "XETV Channel 6 Day" by the San Diego City Council and San Diego County Board of Supervisors (the latter made on April 30 to general manager Chuck Dunning and chief financial officer Rodrigo Salazar). A special segment of the newscast that was dedicated to the anniversary was broadcast in black-and-white (the standard for broadcast television in 1953) with news anchors dressed in period costumes and hairstyles reporting on the major news and entertainment stories of 1953 and giving a contemporary weather forecast with paper graphics pasted on a hand-drawn weather map.