Weigel Broadcasting - History

History

The company was founded by Chicago broadcasting veteran John Weigel, whose career dated back to the 1930s. With $1,000 of his own money, and another $1,000 from his attorney, Daniel J. McCarthy, Weigel bought the broadcasting license for what became the first UHF television station in the Chicago area. WCIU signed on the air on February 6, 1964. One year later, in 1965, Weigel Broadcasting was the subject of a successful hostile takeover at the hands of the Shapiro family.

Over the years, the company began to acquire and also launch new stations in the adjacent markets of Milwaukee and South Bend, Indiana, at first by placing WCIU translators in those markets to gain a foothold in each market, before programming the stations independently. Weigel would end up an unexpected benefactor of the television industry realignment of 1994, as their full-power independent station WDJT-TV in Milwaukee ended up with the CBS affiliation late that year, while WBND-LP became the home of ABC programming in South Bend the next year when the original stations of the networks in each market switched to Fox.

Also in that same year, WCIU dropped the Spanish-language Univision network and became Chicago's only true full-power independent station when WGN-TV and WPWR-TV joined the WB and UPN networks respectively, while WGBO-TV became a Univision-owned station. These changes allowed WCIU to pursue sports rights and syndicated programming not previously available, ultimately giving WCIU some strength in the market.

In July 2008, Weigel announced the creation of This TV, a national subchannel network, operated as a joint venture of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Weigel.

In early August 2008, Weigel Broadcasting agreed to sell all three of its South Bend stations, WBND-LP, WCWW-LP and WMYS-LP, to Schurz Communications, the longtime owner of the local CBS affiliate WSBT-TV, for undisclosed terms. However, in the absence of action by the Federal Communications Commission, the deal was called off in August 2009.

Weigel Broadcasting is launching You and Me This Morning, a program that features entertainment news.

At the end of 2009, Broadcasting & Cable gave Weigel Broadcasting its first annual Multi-Platform Broadcaster of the Year award. The company makes efficient use of digital TV's multicast capabilities, with one main channel and four subchannels for WCIU in Chicago, and Me-TV and This TV on subchannels nationwide.

On November 22, 2010, Weigel announced that they would take the Me-TV concept national and compete fully with RTV and Antenna TV, while complementing its successful sister network This TV.

On December 1, 2010, WCIU dropped their FBT foreign broadcasting digital subchannel (with some of that programming eventually to be moved to Polnet Communications' WPVN-CA) and is currently airing a simulcast of WCIU-TV on WCIU digital subchannel 26.2. The new digital subchannel, The U Too, was officially launched on January 5, 2011. The new digital network will be airing on WCIU digital subchannel 26.2, replacing Me-TV, which moved to WCIU digital subchannel 26.3 on December 15, 2010, and mainly consists of other purchased programming without room on the main WCIU schedule, second runs of WCIU programming or programming burned off due to low ratings.

On January 4, 2011, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Weigel Broadcasting announced plans to distribute Me-TV nationwide. On January 28, 2013, Weigel entered into a partnership with Fox Television Stations to create a new digital subchannel network called Movies!, which is expected to debut on all of Fox's owned-and-operated stations in the spring of 2013.