History
The station began broadcasting on January 11, 1991 as an independent and had the call letters W16AR. It was located on UHF channel 16 and was licensed to Stuart. Retired businessman August Gabriel began the station with $200,000 and three employees. From October 1996 until February 1997, it briefly produced a local morning show known as Good Morning Treasure Coast that was hosted by Tom Teter. Ed Birchfield also briefly hosted a 7 p.m. Treasure Coast News program from February to July 1997.
The station moved to UHF channel 15 in 2001 and again to UHF channel 14 in 2002. It added a translator on UHF channel 53 in order to reach West Palm Beach. At some point, the station received the present calls of WTCN-CA and changed to UHF channel 43. This aired from a transmitter at the western boundary of Johnathan Dickinson State Park in Martin County southwest of Juniper Island. The call letters were originally used by two stations in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota that are now WCCO-TV and KARE.
Bill Brothers, who had been operating WTCN through a local marketing agreement (LMA) since 1997, purchased the station for an undisclosed price in 2001. In 2005, Viacom bought WTCN and sister station WWHB-CA from Bill Brothers for $7.7 million. Viacom moved the station's studios to West Palm Beach and improved its signal. At some point during the first six months of that year, it began airing Kids' WB when the area's primary UPN and secondary WB affiliate WTVX stopped airing it. WTCN became affiliated with The WB, its first full network affiliation, in Fall 2005. Until that point, WTVX had aired programming from that network after UPN prime time.
On January 24, 2006, The WB and UPN announced that they would end broadcasting and merge. The new combined network would be called The CW. The letters would represent the first initial of its corporate parents, CBS (the parent company of UPN) and the Warner Bros. unit of Time Warner. WTVX, which is a full-powered station, was announced as becoming an affiliate of the new network.
On February 22, News Corporation announced that it would start up another new broadcast television network called MyNetworkTV. This new network, which would be sister to Fox, would be operated by Fox Television Stations and its syndication division Twentieth Television. MyNetworkTV was created to give UPN and WB stations that were not becoming CW affiliates another option besides becoming independent. It was also created to compete against The CW.
At the announcement of creating MyNetworkTV, it was unknown if there would be an affiliate in the Treasure and Gold Coasts. However, when the network was launched on September 5, WTCN became an affiliate. Its website was re-located to "wtcn.com" and was formatted with promotions for MyNetworkTV. The "wtcn.com" URL now redirects to its own separate section of the WTVX website. It was one of only two MyNetworkTV affiliates owned by CBS. In 2006, WTCN placed sixth in the Nielsen ratings in the Palm Beach market with 0.4% of the audience.
On February 7, 2007, CBS agreed to sell seven of its smaller-market stations to Cerberus Capital Management for $185 million dollars. Cerberus then formed a new holding company for the stations, Four Points Media Group, who took over the operation of the stations through local marketing agreements in late-June 2007. On January 10, 2008, Four Points officially became the owner of the stations.
During CBS ownership, all three stations (WTVX, WTCN, and WWHB) had some internal operations and master control based at WFOR-TV's studios in Miami which had served as the South Florida flagship of the CBS-owned cluster. On February 25, 2008, the master control for Four Points' entire West Palm Beach cluster were relocated to the hub facility at KUTV in Salt Lake City. After the digital transition date on June 12, 2009, WTCN began airing on WTVX's previous analog channel.
On September 8, 2011, the Sinclair Broadcast Group announced its intent to purchase Four Points from Cerberus Capital Management for $200 million; Sinclair began managing the stations, including WTCN-CA, under local marketing agreements following antitrust approval. Sinclair subsequently announced its purchase of the entire broadcasting division of Freedom Communications, including CBS affiliate WPEC. As a result, Sinclair would control three of the six largest English-language network affiliations in West Palm Beach. The deal with Sinclair acquiring Four Points was completed on January 3, 2012. On May 24, 2012, the FCC granted it a construction permit to flash-cut its signal to digital on channel 43 and become WTCN-CD (with "CD" referring to digital Class A status).
Read more about this topic: WTCN-CA
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