City Tampa, Florida Affiliations PBS | Branding WUSF | |
Slogan Watch and Learn
Watch Listen Learn Channels Digital: 34 (UHF)
Virtual: 16 (PSIP) Owner University of South Florida | ||
WUSF-TV, virtual channel 16 (UHF digital channel 34), is a PBS member television station located in Tampa, Florida, United States and also serving the nearby city of St. Petersburg. The station is owned by the University of South Florida. WUSF maintains studio facilities located on the University of South Florida campus on East Fowler Avenue on the city's northeast side, and its transmitter is located in Riverview, Florida.
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History
The station first signed on the air on September 12, 1966. WUSF-TV's main rival is fellow PBS member station WEDU (channel 3), which has long been one of the highest-rated public television stations in the country. However, due to its ties with the University of South Florida, most of WUSF's programming is educational in nature – including distance learning, which WUSF broadcasts during the afternoon and late-night hours. WUSF was also known for showing a wide variety of home improvement programming, such as Hometime, during the late 1980s and 1990s that WEDU did not regularly program.
On October 12, 2015, the University of South Florida voted to explore placing WUSF-TV into the Federal Communications Commission's spectrum auction in 2016, a move that could lead to the station sharing a channel with another area station, moving its signal to a VHF channel, or ceasing operations altogether. On February 8, 2017, USF announced that the WUSF-TV license had been sold for $18.8 million in the auction, and that the station will cease operations later in the year. USF's radio operations, WUSF FM and WSMR, are not affected by the planned shutdown of WUSF-TV. PBS programming will remain on WEDU after WUSF-TV goes dark.
Digital channels
The station's digital channel is multiplexed:
Analog-to-digital conversion
WUSF-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 16, on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 34, using PSIP to display WUSF-TV's virtual channel as 16 on digital television receivers.