City Melbourne, Florida | Branding UniMás Orlando | |
Channels Digital: 43 (UHF)
Virtual: 43 (PSIP) Subchannels 43.1: 1080i 16:9 WOTF-DT
43.2: 480i 4:3 GetTV
43.3: 480i 4:3 Bounce
43.4: 480i 4:3 Escape Affiliations 43.1: UniMás
43.2: GetTV
43.3: Bounce TV
43.4: Escape Owner Univision Communications, Inc.
(managed by Entravision Communications Corporation)
(UniMas Orlando, Inc.) | ||
WOTF-DT, channel 43, is the UniMás owned-and-operated television station serving Orlando, Florida, United States and is licensed to Melbourne. The station is owned by Univision Communications, WOTF is operated by Entravision Communications through a local marketing agreement with Univision affiliate WVEN-TV (channel 26). The two stations share studios located in Altamonte Springs, and its transmitter is located in Christmas.
Contents
On cable, the station is available in standard definition on channel 17 on Charter Spectrum, channel 22 on Comcast Xfinity, and channel 43 on CenturyLink Prism, and in high definition on Spectrum channel 903, Xfinity channel 441, and CenturyLink Prism channel 1043.
Digital channels
The station's digital channel is multiplexed:
Analog-to-digital conversion
WOTF-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 43, on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television. The station's digital signal relocated from its pre-transition UHF channel 20 to channel 43 for post-transition operations.
History
The station began operation on July 5, 1982 as an independent station under the callsign WMOD. It was owned by Press Broadcasting, and programmed a general entertainment format with an emphasis on movies and drama series, along with some game shows. The station's original studio facilities were located on Enterprise Court in Melbourne. Shows broadcast by the station in its early years included among others Ironside, Bonanza, Soap, One Day At A Time, The Joker's Wild and Tic Tac Dough. In 1984, WMOD became a more traditional independent station, and added sitcoms (such as The Brady Bunch, Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, The Lucy Show, All in the Family, The Odd Couple and The Honeymooners) and cartoons (such as Inspector Gadget, Superfriends and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe).
Being licensed to Melbourne placed the station at a disadvantage, as its transmitter was located 50 miles (80 km) southeast of Orlando due to Federal Communications Commission rules at the time that required a station's transmitter to be located within 15 miles (24 km) of its city of license, with the signal reached Orlando with only grade B coverage and no signal at all was receivable in Daytona Beach. As a result, the station received low ratings despite decent programming.
Soon afterwards, the FCC allocated a commercial license to Clermont, a western suburb of Orlando, on UHF channel 68. Press applied for the license in 1985, and received it in March 1986. The plan was for Press Broadcasting to sell off WMOD to the Home Shopping Network at the same time as the company's new station on channel 68 was built and signed on the air. In the meantime, WMOD agreed to affiliate with the HSN on a part-time basis. Initially in October 1986, WMOD began carrying Home Shopping Network programming during the overnight hours. In January 1987, HSN programming was expanded to the midday hours and by the summer of 1987, the network occupied 18 hours of WMOD's daily schedule. General entertainment programming continued to run on the station evenings from 5 to 11 p.m.
The station still was unable to move its programming unit of general entertainment shows to channel 68 by the fall. Financial constraints also prevented them from moving forward. In order to finish building the new station, in January 1988, WMOD's channel 43 signal was sold to Home Shopping Network affiliate company, Blackstar Broadcasting. That February, it began to run HSN full-time (except for a few hours of religious and public affairs shows on Sunday mornings), and changed its call letters to WBSF. Its cartoons and other barter shows moved to WAYK (channel 56, now WOPX-TV), another Melbourne station with an even weaker signal than channel 43 had. Other existing programming was dropped and moved in November 1988 to the newly built WKCF (channel 68, which relocated to channel 18 in 1992).
When the FCC relaxed ownership restrictions for television stations in 1996, Blackstar sold its stations, including WBSF, to Silver King Broadcasting. Barry Diller later bought the Home Shopping Network soon afterwards. After HSN brought USA Networks, a new plan for WBSF emerged. Channel 43 was to become a general entertainment independent station once again by 2002, along with other stations that were owned by USA Broadcasting. That plan, however, did not materialize, as WBSF and the other USA Broadcasting stations were sold to Univision Communications in 2001. The sale was finalized in January 2002, and the station became an affiliate of TeleFutura under the new callsign of WOTF (the WBSF calls have since been reassigned to a CW affiliate in Bay City, Michigan). In May 2010, the station began broadcasting its network programming in 1080i high definition. In January 2014, the station added subchannel network GetTV. In August, 2014 Escape TV launched on 43.4.