WUCF-TV

WUCF-TV (channel 24) is a PBS member television station in Orlando, Florida, United States, owned by the University of Central Florida (UCF). WUCF-TV and WUCF-FM 89.9, a jazz music radio station, operate from studios on Research Parkway on the UCF campus. WUCF-TV and the unaffiliated religious station WTGL (channel 45) transmit using WUCF-TV's spectrum from a tower near Bithlo.

Location

1 explorer visited this place

Nearby Places

WTGL

WTGL is a religious independent television station licensed to Leesburg, Florida, United States, serving the Orlando area. The station is locally owned by Good Life Broadcasting, and maintains studios on Skyline Drive in Lake Mary, Florida. Through a channel sharing agreement with PBS member station WUCF-TV, the two stations transmit using WUCF-TV's spectrum from an antenna near Bithlo. WTGL airs programming from Total Living Network, World Harvest Television and The Worship Network. Prior to mid-2010, it was affiliated with Faith TV until that network became My Family TV. That network has since moved to low-power station WSCF-LD.

Train

WPOZ

WPOZ is a non-commercial, listener-supported radio station licensed to Orlando, and serving all of Central Florida. It is owned by Central Florida Educational Foundation, Inc., and operated by Z Ministries, inc. It broadcasts a Christian adult contemporary format. The radio studios are in Altamonte Springs. WPOZ has an effective radiated power of 100,000 watts. The transmitter is in east Orange County, Florida. WPOZ is simulcast on several other owned stations in Central Florida. The station broadcasts using HD Radio technology. There are other Christian music formats on WPOZ's three digital subchannels, which feed several FM translators in Orlando and other cities in Central Florida.

Train

WOFL

WOFL is a television station in Orlando, Florida, United States, serving as the market's Fox network outlet. It is owned and operated by the network's Fox Television Stations division alongside WRBW, an independent station with MyNetworkTV. The two stations share studios on Skyline Drive in Lake Mary; WOFL's transmitter is located in Bithlo, Florida. WOFL's local news programming is also broadcast on co-owned WOGX, serving Ocala and Gainesville. Channel 35 in Orlando went on the air as WSWB-TV on March 31, 1974. Built by Sun World Broadcasters, WSWB-TV was Orlando's first independent station. After facing 19 months of construction delays, it suffered from financial difficulties within months of launching. This culminated in the station's equipment being seized by federal marshals on September 30, 1976. Three years of legal wrangling over a buyer followed. Omega Communications, a company led by former Taft Broadcasting executive Bud Rogers, beat out Ted Turner and the Christian Broadcasting Network and put channel 35 back on the air October 15, 1979, as WOFL. Under Omega and Meredith Corporation, which became its full owner in 1983, the station prospered as the highest-rated and, for some years, the only full-market independent station in rapidly growing Central Florida. WOFL began airing local newscasts in March 1998, first at 10 p.m. before expanding to mornings. After Meredith traded WOFL to Fox Television Stations in 2002, the news department grew aggressively over the course of the 2000s, with additional hours of morning, early evening, and late evening newscasts.

Brewery Distillery

2.0 km

WHLV-TV

WHLV-TV is a religious television station licensed to Cocoa, Florida, United States, serving the Orlando area. The station is owned by the Trinity Broadcasting Network. WHLV-TV's transmitter is located in unincorporated Bithlo, Florida. WHLV-TV formerly operated from studios located within the TBN-owned Holy Land Experience, a Christian theme park which closed in 2020. One year earlier in 2019, the Federal Communications Commission abolished the "Main Studio Rule", which required full-service television stations like WHLV-TV to maintain facilities in or near their communities of license.

Train

WVEN-TV

WVEN-TV is a television station licensed to Melbourne, Florida, United States, serving as the Orlando area outlet for the Spanish-language network Univision. It is owned and operated by TelevisaUnivision alongside low-power, Class A UniMás station WRCF-CD. The two stations share studios on Douglas Avenue in Altamonte Springs; WVEN-TV's transmitter is located in Bithlo, Florida. Channel 43 went on the air as WMOD, an English-language independent station, on July 5, 1982. Built by an investor group led by former U.S. representative Louis Frey Jr., the station was the first broadcast TV station in Brevard County. Its early history was pocked with technical and financial trouble; the station's launch was delayed a day due to technical troubles, and signal issues caused many advertisers to flee. A larger signal issue was created when federal aviation authorities refused to allow the station to raise the height of its tower, which would have improved reception in the populous Orlando area. In 1985, New Jersey–based Press Broadcasting bought WMOD, intending to make it a more highly viewed independent in the Orlando market. It soon struggled with the same signal limitations and began a search for a remedy. In the meantime, it ceded most of the station's airtime, as well as a purchase option, to the Home Shopping Network. This gave Press time to purchase a construction permit for channel 68 and to set up a future swap to channel 18. HSN assigned its purchase option to Black-owned Blackstar Communications, which took over WMOD in April 1988 and began running it as an all-home shopping station under the new call sign WBSF. Press retained the station's syndicated programming inventory and used it to launch WKCF later that year. Blackstar sold WBSF to USA Broadcasting in 1998, but a planned change in program format never materialized, and USA Broadcasting sold the station to Univision in 2001. It was one of the USA Broadcasting stations used to start the Telefutura network—precursor to UniMás—on January 14, 2002. The station changed call signs, first to WFUO and then to WOTF-TV. Univision already had a local affiliate in Orlando, WVEN-TV, and let its owner, Entravision Communications, handle local sales and promotion for WOTF-TV and Univision-owned Telefutura stations in five other markets. In 2017, in most of these markets, Univision and UniMás switched signals, moving Univision programming to the Univision-owned license even though Entravision continued to handle operations; as a result, WVEN-TV and WOTF-TV exchanged call signs. In Orlando and Tampa, this agreement was wound down at the end of 2021, making WVEN-TV a Univision owned-and-operated station.

Train

More nearby places... Discovery

Orlando's channel 24 went on the air as WMFE-TV on March 15, 1965. It was put on the air by a consortium of county school systems and initially served exclusively to provide daytime instructional programs for Central Florida schools. It was transferred to Orange County school board control in 1967 and to a community board of directors in 1970, coinciding with its expansion into non-instructional public programming. At the time, Orlando was the largest Florida city without public television programming. In 1975, the station began broadcasting from Bithlo, giving it a full-market signal. WMFE-TV operated from the Mid-Florida Technical Institute until 1978, when it bought and moved into the studios formerly used by the failed commercial station WSWB-TV. The facility provided the springboard for WMFE's entry into public radio, with WMFE-FM 90.7 launching in 1980. Over the course of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, WMFE-TV's emphasis on local programming fluctuated considerably, with expansions often followed by cutbacks and cancellations. It aired fewer PBS programs than most primary PBS stations in comparably sized markets and, despite high viewership, struggled with lower-than-average rates of viewer donation and corporate support. In the meantime, two community college–owned TV stations started in areas overlapping WMFE-TV: WCEU (now WDSC-TV) in Daytona Beach) and WBCC in Cocoa, which began airing PBS programming in 1989 and 2002, respectively. The presence of these stations created a "triple overlap" that harmed WMFE-TV's finances. After severe cutbacks during the Great Recession and with support for WMFE-TV dropping while WMFE-FM grew, WMFE opted to exit television in 2011 and agreed to sell channel 24 to an organization affiliated with the Daystar Television Network. On July 1, 2011, a partnership between WBCC and UCF known as WUCF TV became the sole PBS station in Central Florida as WMFE-TV and WDSC-TV disaffiliated. During this time, WMFE-TV aired the Spanish-language public network V-me. The deal with Daystar failed when the Federal Communications Commission questioned the buyer's qualifications to own an educational TV station license. UCF acquired the WMFE-TV license and transmission facility in 2012 and made channel 24 the PBS station as WUCF-TV that November. The station's flagship local program, NewsNight, was canceled in 2025 amid the discontinuation of federal funding for public broadcasting.