Channel 57 had been assigned to Philadelphia as an educational channel, but in 1970, Vue-Metrics, Inc. expressed interest in starting a station in Philadelphia. Its goal was to broadcast over-the-air subscription television (STV) programming on the station—in fact, Vue-Metrics filed the first request to the FCC for regular FCC authorization. It originally filed for channel 23, but the Federal Communications Commission was in the process of redesignating that channel for educational use at Camden, New Jersey, leading to the designation of channel 57 for commercial use in Philadelphia. Vue-Metrics was not the only company to express interest in channel 57 as a conduit for STV: Radio Broadcasting Company (RBC) applied on December 24, 1971, for the channel. The two groups proposed different systems for delivering the STV service. Vue-Metrics specified the use of the Phonevision system by Zenith Electronics, while RBC intended to use equipment made by Blonder-Tongue.
A designation of the Vue-Metrics and Radio Broadcasting Company applications for comparative hearing did not come until June 24, 1976; issues to be raised in the hearing primarily centered around the finances of each bidder. An initial decision from an FCC hearing examiner, favoring Radio Broadcasting Company, was issued in September 1977. By this time, there had been substantial changes in the proposal. Instead of Phonevision, the subscription operation proposed for channel 57 would be a franchisee of ON TV, whose first service in Los Angeles had launched that March, and use equipment developed by one of ON TV's owners, Oak Industries. The examiner's initial decision did not represent not an immediate green light to start building. Vue-Metrics, which was now headed by Robert S. Block (whose SelecTV was about to launch), had appealed the examiner's earlier move to dismiss its application as incomplete to the full FCC. The commission upheld the initial decision in October 1978. Construction began in 1979, with the company opting to begin the process of erecting facilities in the Manayunk area despite Vue-Metrics continuing its appeals in federal court.
On June 15, 1981, WWSG-TV—named for RBC owner William S. Gross—took to the air for the first time with the movie The North Avenue Irregulars. Its first program broadcasts were entirely scrambled and seen by next to nobody: there were fewer than 50 installed households, all of them belonging to station employees. Even though its STV service used Oak equipment, it utilized movies from SelecTV, Oak's primary competitor. WWSG-TV joined a series of communications-related businesses under the RBC umbrella, including mobile paging, background music, and the distribution of HBO to area multipoint microwave services. Delays in the launch of its daytime commercial program provider, the new Financial News Network, postponed the start of non-STV broadcasts to November 30. With FNN on air, the station aired financial programming and talk shows from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., when STV service began.
WWSG-TV's SelecTV was not the only subscription service to enter the Delaware Valley in 1981. Later that year, Wometco Home Theater (WHT) expanded south from its base in New York City by launching on WRBV-TV (channel 65) in Vineland, New Jersey. Even though SelecTV got on the air first, WHT initially took the lead in subscribers. By January 1983, WHT had 20,000 subscribers to SelecTV's 12,000. After subscription TV was deregulated by the FCC in 1982, removing a rule that stations had to provide 28 hours a week of free programs, WWSG-TV dropped Financial News Network programming and began offering SelecTV around the clock on January 9, 1983.
In its first unscrambled sports telecast in history, the station aired a Flyers telecast on November 15, 1984—Bobby Clarke Night—that was available to non-subscribers. The success of PRISM as a subscription service led Wometco Home Theater to leave the Philadelphia market at the end of November 1984.
At the start of 1985, rumors began to swirl that WWSG-TV was about to be sold and turned into a full-time ad-supported commercial station. Milton Grant, an independent station builder who had just put WBFS-TV on the air in Miami the year prior, was buying the rights to show various syndicated reruns, such as Dallas and Eight Is Enough, in the Philadelphia market, contingent on the purchase of channel 57. In March, the rumors were confirmed: Grant's company, Grant Broadcasting System (GBS), was purchasing WWSG-TV from RBC for $30 million at the same time that the Gross family sought to buy WWAC-TV in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Grant intended not only to convert channel 57 to ad-supported programming but upgrade its underpowered transmitting facility to the UHF maximum of five million watts. The filing of the application revealed that RBC had lost nearly $750,000 since 1981 on its STV venture. This compared with the $32.5 million RBC had made the year before by selling its successful paging business to communications conglomerate Metromedia. In the sale, Gross retained lifetime rights to conduct datacasting in the vertical blanking interval of the television station, which he used to start a business transmitting text information to scrolling displays in bars and restaurants. On October 20, 1985, WWSG-TV became WGBS-TV—call letters representing the Grant Broadcasting System—operating from studios on 20th Street and branding as Philly 57.
Grant promised to "come on full-grown" with his new channel 57, and his company was able to make splashy acquisitions in part because Philadelphia only had two independent stations. The station that had been the third independent in the market, WKBS-TV (channel 48), had been shuttered in 1983 owing to the dissolution of its owner, Field Communications. When Grant inquired who had the rights to air Villanova men's basketball, the answer was nobody: there had been no regular broadcasts of the Philadelphia Big 5 since channel 48 left the air. GBS, seeking to mirror the tentpole sports acquisitions it had made in Miami, signed a three-year deal for at least 20 Villanova basketball games and telecasts of the revived Villanova football team, worth nearly $1 million. Three months later, the Flyers ended a 15-year relationship with WTAF-TV (channel 29) to become the primary sports attraction on channel 57 as part of a $3.3 million contract; the team cited the recent purchase of the Phillies by a group headed by Taft Broadcasting, WTAF-TV's owner. The start of the first season of WGBS-TV was marred by the fact that not all cable systems added it to their lineups in the wake of must-carry regulations being struck down by a federal court earlier that year; this slightly limited the station's reach, particularly compared to its independent competitors.
In the field of entertainment programming, Grant brought its free-spending ways to the Philadelphia market. This would send ripples through several other groups' plans to enter the market. At the time, channel 48 was in the comparative hearing stage for a new licensee, and one company, BCT Communications, withdrew from the contest in November 1985. The company's lawyer told The Inquirer, "I think Milt Grant was doing a pretty good number on tying up whatever programming was available." In July 1986, WTGI-TV launched from Wilmington, Delaware; channel 57's relaunch eclipsed its original programming plan, and the station switched to a home shopping and later multicultural format. Another competitor, WSJT-TV—the former WRBV-TV—took itself out of the running that same year by selling to the Home Shopping Network.
In February 1993, Combined retained a bank to evaluate offers for the three ex-Grant stations. Six months later, Combined announced it had a buyer for WGBS-TV: Fox Television Stations, which would purchase channel 57 for $70 million and make it the new Fox station for Philadelphia, replacing WTXF-TV (the former WTAF-TV). WTXF-TV's owner, Paramount Stations Group (a subsidiary of Paramount Pictures), strongly criticized Fox's plans to pull its affiliation. It warned, "All affiliates of Fox should take note of the level of loyalty and commitment Fox has exhibited. Apparently Fox's loyalty only recognizes the partnership nature of a network affiliate's relationship when it is convenient to Fox's own economic interest." The move brought speculation of what was next for channel 57 as a Fox affiliate. With a switch that would have taken place in April 1994, at the end of channel 29's Fox affiliation agreement, the station was also seen as likely to start a local newsroom, providing the first competition to WTXF's 10 p.m. newscast. It also fueled existing speculation that Paramount was planning to join with Chris-Craft Industries to create a new network; when what eventually became the United Paramount Network (UPN) was announced that October as a joint venture of the two companies (with Paramount/Viacom holding only a programming partnership until it purchased 50 percent of the network in 1996), WTXF was named as its Philadelphia affiliate.
The NAACP protest would have implications for Fox that outlasted its attempt to buy WGBS-TV. In June 1994, the FCC opened a foreign ownership review into Murdoch's existing station holdings; had it ruled negatively, a forced ownership change or license loss could have meant the end of the network. It was not until July 1995, when Fox won approval to buy television stations in Boston, Denver, and Memphis, Tennessee, that the foreign-ownership issue was resolved, removing a roadblock to purchases by the company.
UPN launched on January 16, 1995, with WGBS-TV as the Philadelphia affiliate. The Viacom acquisition of WGBS-TV and WBFS-TV closed in August, simultaneous with the sale of WTXF-TV, and on December 11, the station changed its call letters once more to reflect a new owner, this time becoming WPSG for Paramount Stations Group. Under Paramount, the station once again became a heavy sports broadcaster, with the help of local regional sports network Comcast SportsNet. After three seasons with no broadcast partner, the 76ers signed a deal with the station to air 21 games a season beginning in 1997. The Flyers returned to channel 57 for the 1998–1999 season, airing 20 regular-season games a year, after WPHL-TV objected to the preemptions of WB network programming that the team had generated in recent seasons. They were joined by the Phillies, for the first time in station history, which began airing 70 telecasts a season on WPSG in 1999.
Viacom bought CBS in 2000, creating a duopoly with KYW-TV; that same year, Viacom also purchased Chris-Craft's 50% share of UPN for $5.5 billion. Though WPSG's operations were migrated into KYW-TV's studios at Independence Mall and the station started running prime time weather updates from KYW-TV meteorologists, separate general managers were retained for both stations, and the consolidation process moved gradually. CBS-owned KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh assumed operational responsibility for WNPA.
On April 2, 2007, WPSG and KYW-TV relocated their operations to new studios at 1500 Spring Garden Street in Philadelphia, near the Community College of Philadelphia; the former studio facility was then demolished to make way for the National Museum of American Jewish History. Meanwhile, the station gradually lost its sports franchises. After the 2008 season, the Phillies returned to WPHL-TV. In 2009, all local telecasts of Flyers and Sixers games moved to Comcast SportsNet and The Comcast Network.
KYW-TV began to produce a 10 p.m. newscast for WPSG on February 2, 2009. This partnership would extend into the mornings on June 29, 2009, when Wake Up News was replaced with a two-hour extension of KYW-TV's Eyewitness News This Morning. The morning newscast continued until June 2015, when it was canceled as part of major programming and staff changes. A morning newscast returned in January 2023, with a simulcast of CBS News Philadelphia's streaming 7 a.m. newscast.
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