Branding Channel 15 | ||
Slogan Public television that matters Channels Digital: 33 (UHF)
Virtual: 15 (PSIP) Subchannels 15.1 Educational Ind.
15.2 Florida Channel
15.3 MHz WorldView Owner Daytona State College
(Daytona State College, Inc.) First air date February 8, 1988; 29 years ago (1988-02-08) | ||
WDSC-TV, virtual channel 15 (UHF digital channel 33) is an independent non-commercial educational public television station located in Daytona Beach, Florida. The station is a former member station of the Public Broadcasting Service, and is owned and operated by Daytona State College and has its studios at the Center for Educational Telecommunications on the DSC campus. It is licensed to nearby New Smyrna Beach.
Contents
History
In 1985, DSC (then known as Daytona Beach Community College), Bethune-Cookman College, Stetson University, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and the Atlantic Center for the Arts formed the Coastal Educational Broadcasters in order to bring a public television station to Volusia and Flagler counties. They felt WMFE-TV, the PBS station in Orlando, was neglecting Daytona Beach. Channel 15 signed on February 8, 1988 as WCEU with a limited schedule of three hours a day, three days a week. Support in the area was enough that within nine months, it was recognized by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. By January 1989, it was a full-fledged PBS member station, though it didn't expand to a fuller broadcast day until 1993.
In 1992, a signal expansion and must-carry rules expanded WCEU's audience to over 1.3 million viewers in Central Florida, including Orlando itself. It moved to its current facility in 1999. DBCC became the sole licensee in 2002.
In 2005, WCEU rebranded itself as DBCC 15 to better reflect its relationship with DBCC. In January 2008, it rebranded itself again merely as Channel 15, after DBCC became Daytona Beach College. The college subsequently changed its name again to Daytona State College; to reflect this, in November 2008, channel 15 changed its call letters to the current WDSC-TV, after purchasing the rights to the call letters from a radio station in Dillon, South Carolina.
WDSC-TV shut down its analog signal on December 15, 2008, some two months before the end of full-service analog broadcasting; this came after the transmitter suffered a failure on September 25, forcing the station to broadcast at reduced power.
With the advent of digital broadcasting, WDSC-TV began billing itself as a full-market PBS station, including Orlando. While it had been available on cable in Orlando for over a decade, its digital signal, located in Bithlo with most other television stations in the market, gives it an over-the-air coverage area comparable to the market's previous primary PBS station WMFE-TV. However, on June 16, 2011, WDSC and PBS announced that the station would leave PBS, as Daytona State College could no longer afford to purchase its programming, following $4.8 million of funding to Florida's public radio and television stations vetoed by Governor Rick Scott in May 2011. WMFE also left PBS on July 1 due to its now-failed acquisition by Daystar). These moves left WBCC of Cocoa, which began branding as WUCF-TV at that time, as the only PBS station in the Central Florida television market. (WUCF-TV moved to the former WMFE-TV in 2012, a move that led to WBCC, now WEFS, departing PBS as well.)
Digital channels
The station's digital channel is multiplexed:
Analog-to-digital conversion
WDSC-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 15, on December 15, 2008. The station's digital signal continued to broadcasts on its pre-transition UHF channel 33. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 15.
The station continues to air public television from other sources such as American Public Television and the National Educational Telecommunications Association.