WPCH-TV

WPCH-TV
ATSC 3.0 station
Channels
Branding
  • Peachtree TV
  • Atlanta's CW
Programming
Affiliations
Ownership
Owner
WANF, WKTB-CD
History
First air date
September 1, 1967
(57 years ago)
 (1967-09-01)
Former call signs
  • WJRJ-TV (1967–1970)
  • WTCG (1970–1979)
  • WTBS (1979–2007)
Former channel number(s)
  • Analog: 17 (UHF, 1967–2009)
  • Digital: 20 (UHF, 2002–2019)
Independent (1967–2023)
Call sign meaning
"Peachtree", a common place/road naming theme
Technical information[1]
Licensing authority
FCC
Facility ID64033
ERP805 kW
HAAT329 m (1,079 ft)
Transmitter coordinates33°48′26.4″N 84°20′21.5″W / 33.807333°N 84.339306°W / 33.807333; -84.339306
Links
Public license information
WebsitePeachtree TV

WPCH-TV (channel 17), branded on-air as Peachtree TV, is a television station in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, affiliated with The CW. It is owned by locally based Gray Television alongside CBS affiliate and company flagship WANF (channel 46), and low-power, Class A Telemundo affiliate WKTB-CD (channel 47). WPCH-TV and WANF share studios on 14th Street Northwest in Atlanta's Home Park neighborhood; WPCH-TV's transmitter is located in the Woodland Hills section of northeastern Atlanta.

During its ownership under the Turner Broadcasting System (which owned the station from April 1970 until February 2017), WPCH-TV—then using the WTCG call letters—pioneered the distribution of broadcast television stations retransmitted by communications satellite to cable and satellite subscribers throughout the United States, expanding the small independent station into the first national "superstation" on December 17, 1976. (The station eventually became among the first four American superstations to begin being distributed to television providers in Canada in 1985.)

The former superstation feed—which eventually became known as simply TBS, and had maintained a nearly identical program schedule as the local Atlanta feed—was converted by Turner into a conventional basic cable network on October 1, 2007, at which time it was concurrently added to cable providers within the Atlanta market (including Comcast and Charter) alongside its existing local carriage on satellite providers DirecTV and Dish Network. Channel 17—which had used the WTBS callsign since 1979—was concurrently relaunched as WPCH and reformatted as a traditional independent station with a separate schedule exclusively catering to the Atlanta market. Although the Atlanta station is no longer carried on American multichannel television providers outside of its home market, WPCH-TV continues to be available as a de facto superstation on most Canadian cable and satellite providers.

As of September 2024, WPCH-TV is the largest CW affiliate that is neither owned nor operated by the network's majority owner, Nexstar Media Group.

  1. ^ "Facility Technical Data for WPCH-TV". Licensing and Management System. Federal Communications Commission.