| ATSC 3.0 station | |
|---|---|
 | |
| |
| Channels | |
| Branding | The CW Baltimore |
| Programming | |
| Affiliations |
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| Ownership | |
| Owner |
|
| Operator | Sinclair Broadcast Group |
| WBFF, WUTB | |
| History | |
First air date | July 1, 1982 |
Former call signs | WNUV-TV (1982–1998) |
Former channel number(s) |
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| |
Call sign meaning | Station was founded by New-Vision, Inc. |
| Technical information[1] | |
Licensing authority | FCC |
| Facility ID | 7933 |
| ERP | 750 kW |
| HAAT | 372.8 m (1,223 ft) |
| Transmitter coordinates | 39°20′10.4″N 76°38′57.9″W / 39.336222°N 76.649417°W |
| Links | |
Public license information | |
| Website | cwbaltimore |
WNUV (channel 54) is a television station in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, affiliated with The CW. It is owned by Cunningham Broadcasting, which maintains a local marketing agreement (LMA) with Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner of Fox/MyNetworkTV affiliate WBFF (channel 45), for the provision of programming and certain services. However, Sinclair effectively owns WNUV, as the majority of Cunningham's stock is owned by the family of deceased group founder Julian Smith. Sinclair also operates TBD affiliate WUTB (channel 24) under a separate shared services agreement with Deerfield Media. The stations share studios on 41st Street off the Jones Falls Expressway on Television Hill in the Woodberry neighborhood of north Baltimore; WBFF and WNUV are also broadcast from the same tower on the hill.[2]
WNUV began broadcasting on July 1, 1982. During the day, it ran specialty programming from the Financial News Network, which was subsidized by its nighttime broadcast of Super TV, a subscription television service that operated in the Washington and Baltimore areas. Super TV peaked at 30,000 Baltimore subscribers in August 1983, but even though the city of Baltimore was late to be wired for cable, the industry suffered a national decline in the mid-1980s, and WNUV ceased airing Super TV on March 31, 1986. In preparation for its closure, the station had begun to recast itself as a general-entertainment independent station as early as 1984. The founding owner and namesake, New-Vision, Inc., sold the station to ABRY Communications in 1989; ABRY upgraded the transmitter and increased the station's visibility with a campaign allowing residents to vote on programming choices.
ABRY attempted to sell WNUV to Glencairn, Ltd.—a forerunner to Cunningham, owned by former Sinclair employee Edwin Edwards and the mother of the Smith children that controlled Sinclair—in 1993. The deal was met with public scrutiny, and though it initially fell apart, ABRY signed an LMA directly with Sinclair in 1994 before transferring the license to Glencairn the next year. WNUV affiliated first with UPN in 1995 before switching to The WB in a group deal in 1998 and The CW upon those two networks' merger in 2006. The station aired a WBFF-produced early evening newscast from 1997 to 2005; for most of its history since Sinclair began programming channel 54, it has been used as a test bed for television transmission technologies.
- ^ "Facility Technical Data for WNUV". Licensing and Management System. Federal Communications Commission.
- ^ Fybush, Scott (January 15, 2010). "TV Hill, Baltimore, 2008". Tower Site of the Week. Archived from the original on April 2, 2019. Retrieved September 10, 2018.