WICD (TV) - History

History

The station signed-on April 23, 1959 as WCHU-TV. It was an NBC affiliate and aired an analog signal on UHF channel 33. It was owned by Plains Television Partners and was a low-powered full-time satellite of Springfield's WICS. The WCHU signal traveled about 15 miles from a transmitter at its studios atop the Inman Hotel in Downtown Champaign. However, getting a decent signal from Springfield (85 miles west of Champaign) was usually hit-or-miss at best. Plains Television had to build a microwave tower in Northwestern Champaign to send the WICS signal to the WCHU studios. With a more reliable signal, the station began a more routine schedule on September 14. It began broadcasting in color the next year.

In July 1960, Plains Television Partners bought WDAN-TV in Danville. That station had debuted on December 19, 1953 as a low-powered ABC affiliate broadcasting on channel 24 with a signal radiating about 25 miles from its transmitter. WDAN was owned by Gannett Company subsidiary Northwest Publishing, owner and publisher of the Danville Commercial-News newspaper, along with WDAN radio (1490 AM). After the sale, Plains Television changed WDAN-TV's call letters to WICD (Federal Communications Commission regulations at the time required separately-owned stations to use different call signs, and the Commercial-News retained WDAN radio) and made it a full repeater of WCHU.

From 1960 until 1967, WCHU/WICD aired some locally originated programs from the WCHU studios in Champaign. However, WICD's transmitter was not capable of broadcasting local programming in color. In June 1966, Plains Television announced WCHU and WICD would merge into a single full-power station broadcasting on channel 15. It would operate under the WICD call letters, but use WCHU's license and studios at the Inman Hotel in Champaign. The new station would broadcast at a million watts from the tallest tower in Illinois, at 1,385 feet. The new station was to have gone on-air in January 1967, but an ice storm toppled the tower. It was eventually rebuilt and the new WICD went on-air in July. However, there are unconfirmed reports of a delay in the final paperwork for the new station and it may have originally gone on as WCHU. While the old WICD's call letters stood for WICS Danville, the current station's calls stand for WICS Champaign/Danville.

The station moved from the Inman Hotel to its current studio facility on Country Fair Drive in 1978.

In 1986, WICS was purchased by Guy Gannett Broadcasting (no relation to the much larger Gannett Company) but WICD remained under the ownership of Plains Television. The two stations operated as a regional network simulcasting most network and syndicated programming. This arrangement nearly brought down WICD, and for much of the 1980s it looked like it would revert to being a full-time satellite of WICS. In 1994, Plains Television sold WICD to Guy Gannett, which pumped significant resources into the station particularly its news department. Guy Gannett then sold most of its television properties, including WICD/WICS, to the Sinclair Broadcast Group in 1999. Soon after Sinclair took over, it turned around and announced it was selling WICS and WICD (which are counted as one station for regulatory purposes) as well as KGAN in Cedar Rapids, Iowa to Sunrise Television.

However, the FCC did not allow Sunrise to buy WICD/WICS due to Sunrise's ownership structure. Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst (HMTF), an investment firm controlled by then-Texas Rangers and Dallas Stars owner Tom Hicks, owned a large block of Sunrise stock. HMTF is majority stockholder of the LIN TV Corporation then-owner of WAND in Decatur. The FCC ruled HMTF held enough stock in Sunrise that an acquisition of WICD/WICS would result in a duopoly between two of the four highest-rated stations in the market which is forbidden by FCC rules. Sinclair subsequently withdrew the offer to sell the three stations in 2000. The station's 46-year affiliation with NBC ended on September 5, 2005 when, as part of a larger national deal between LIN TV and NBC that also involved WDTN in Dayton, Ohio (who swapped affiliations with WICS/WICD's Dayton sister station WKEF the year before), WICD and WICS swapped affiliations with WAND and became ABC affiliates.

With this switch, WICD replaced WAND as the default ABC affiliate for the Illinois side of the Terre Haute market, which has not had an ABC affiliate of its own since longtime affiliate WBAK-TV (now WAWV-TV) switched to Fox in 1995. The network swap actually improved reception for ABC programming on the Illinois side of the market. WICD's transmitter is not far from the Indiana line while WAND's transmitter in Argenta is near the middle of the state. Due to contracts with satellite providers, WICS is the ABC station in the market uplinked on the Champaign/Urbana/Springfield local feeds. Nielsen Media Research counts WICD and WICS as one station and identifies this station as "WICS+" in its ratings books. For the same reason, when Dish Network dropped WRTV from Indianapolis as the local ABC affiliate for the Terre Haute feed, it uplinked WICS rather than WICD. However, this will likely end at the start of the 2011-12 television season, when WAWV-TV rejoins ABC.