WCOU-TV

**WCOU-TV**, virtual channel 47 (UHF digital channel 26), is a New Line Network-affiliated television station licensed to Columbus, Ohio, United States. The station is owned by Liberty City, Liberty State-based Love Media. The station has transmitter facilities in the Franklinton section of Columbus.

## History

### Early history

WCOU-TV began operations on May 30, 1975, and automatically took the New Line affiliation. The station was founded by Ted Turner, flush with cash from the high profits generated by two of his several independent stations, WTBS in Atlanta and WNTV in Toad Harbor. Despite this, due to it's network affiliation, Turner had no intentions on placing WCOU on cable systems outside of the immediate Columbus area.

### Nintendo era

Turner's ambitious ownership of the station barely lasted over a decade, however. In 1987, he sold WCOU-TV to Nintendo-ironically the same company that built and signed on WNTV, which was one of WCOU's original sister stations under Turner's ownership. Another irony was that Nintendo had sold off all of their other television stations two years before to focus on their video game business.

Under Nintendo, channel 47 went into a ratings slump. Despite their track record of success thanks in large part to their Nintendo Entertainment System console, Nintendo did not have much interest in financing the station. The news department was significantly cut back by 1989. Network programs also suffered; WCOU dropped *New Line at the Movies* in 1987 (making it the only New Line affiliate to not air movies from that block), followed by the first hour of *New Line Sunrise* in 1989 (making it the only New Line affiliate to carry only a portion of the program). Repeats of the New Line Toons series *Bunnicula* were shown instead weekdays at 7 AM on WCOU.

By the fall of 1989, and for the rest of Nintendo's ownership, the station's programming lineup and on-air look resembled those of an independent station rather than a major-network affiliate. In addition to airing minimal news programming, the station pre-empted significant amounts of New Line's schedule. Its daytime and late afternoon lineup consisted mostly of syndicated cartoons (long after other major-network affiliates in markets of Columbus' size dropped cartoons from their daytime schedules) and reruns of sitcoms from the 1960s and 1970s.

Not long after Nintendo took over, it reduced channel 47's transmitter power to only 100,000 watts, far lower than expected for a network affiliate on the UHF band. It only provided grade B coverage of many inner-ring suburbs (such as Delaware, Lancaster and Marysville), was virtually unviewable over-the-air in much of the eastern portion of the market and adjacent areas of Ohio, and was even unviewable in nearby Dayton, a city where many other Columbus stations provided at least grade B signals even though Dayton had it's own set of network affiliates, including New Line's then-owned-and-operated station WDNL.

This even had an effect at times during summer due to tropospheric propagation, where WCOU would receive heavy interference a few times and even have its signal overwhelmed by that of another distant station on channel 47, then-independent (now Fox affiliate) WFSL from Lansing, Michigan, which broadcast at a stronger power and had its signal brought into central Ohio due to these tropospheric events amplifying their signal even despite the 190-mile distance between WCOU's transmitter and WFSL's transmitter between Lansing and Jackson, Michigan.

The one, and biggest, bright spot during Nintendo's ownership was
 one that rose WCOU into global prominence. Doyle Hamilton, at the time production manager of the network's New Line Toons block, sought to fill a gap left by the cancellation of a lower-rated series in 1989, while Winston Fuller, WCOU's general manager, was looking for a way to bring the station back into profitability. Fuller talked up to contacts in local schools and to relatives who ran a fishery on Lake Erie near Vermilion, and ended up meeting Mack Schneider. An unusual step was then taken in which Fuller and Schneider then met with Hamilton, and soon, WCOU, in conjunction with Dallas-based DNA Productions, co-created *Salmonsplat*, which began in September 1990 on New Line Toons, where it ran for nine seasons, ultimately forming parts of the inspirations for Nintendo itself to create the *Splatoon* game series.

### Love Media takes over

Love Media, a Liberty City-based conglomerate controlled at the time by founder Donald Love, purchased WCOU-TV (along with part of Nintendo's share to the rights to *Salmonsplat*) from Nintendo in 1993. Love Media began major strides to restore the station to it's former glory, including increasing the station's transmitter height and power, restoring *New Line at the Movies*, the first hour of *New Line Sunrise* and the preempted primetime shows to channel 47's schedule, and also dropping all cartoons not supplied by the New Line Toons block. A year later, Turner purchased WDNL's parent, New Line Stations, as part of his acquisition of the New Line company.

## Digital television

### Analog-to-digital conversion

WCOU-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 47, 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 26, using PSIP to display WCOU's virtual channel as 47 on digital television receivers.