WSFB-TV

**WSFB-TV** (channel 40), is a television station in Miami, Florida, United States, affiliated with MyNetworkTV. Owned by the TVX Broadcast Group, the station maintains studios on Northwest 18th Terrace in Doral, and its transmitter is located in Andover, Florida.

## History

WSFB-TV began broadcasting on April 4, 1982. It operated from studios in Northwest 26th Street in Midtown Miami. By the time it went on air, Glen Dennis had become the outright owner, and WSFB-TV's sign-on heralded the start of independent stations' South Florida Broadcasting System. Dennis became an aggressive buyer of syndicated programming sometimes years in advance. However, the station’s commitment to Miami Hurricanes football and men's basketball became more popular.

In 1988, WSFB-TV became the over-the-air home of the Miami Heat of the NBA. It added rights to 40 games from the Florida Marlins of Major League Baseball's National League, and 12 road games of the Florida Panthers of the NHL by 1993. Despite being run by a consortium of creditors, WSFB-TV continued to do well under SF Broadcasting’s stewardship.

In 1993, SF put WSFB-TV up for sale, seeking $90 million. Chris-Craft Industries expressed interest in the station, but SF decided to take it off the market later. In April 1994, SF signed an affiliation agreement for WSFB-TV with The WB, a new television network slated to start in January 1995.

### **Sale to Paramount and affiliation with UPN**

In 1994, SF Broadcasting reached an agreement to sell WSFB-TV to the Paramount Stations Group. As a consequence, Paramount announced that the station would join the soon-to-be-created United Paramount Network (UPN), which was created through a programming partnership with Chris-Craft, and that WSFB-TV and WDZL would swap proposed affiliates to leave WSFB-TV with UPN and WDZL with The WB. WSFB-TV joined the new UPN at its launch on January 16, 1995.

As UPN expanded in programming offering, the sports teams left. The Heat had returned to WSFB-TV in 1993, but they signed a deal with WMIM-TV (channel 69) in 1998. The Marlins followed suit in 1999.

In 2000, Paramount's parent company Viacom merged with CBS, making WSFB-TV a sister station to CBS-owned and operated station WMIA-TV (channel 6). As a result of being consolidated with WMIA-TV, WSFB-TV had occasionally aired CBS network programming to accommodate the CBS station's coverage of news and weather events and Miami Dolphins preseason coverage.

### **Transition to MyNetworkTV**

On January 24, 2006, CBS Corporation (which had been formed from the split of Viacom in two) and Time Warner's Warner Bros. Entertainment division announced that they would dissolve UPN and The WB, moving some of their programs to a newly created network, The CW. WSFB-TV was not included as a charter affiliate of The CW, as the deal also included a long-term affiliation pact with Tribune Broadcasting stations—including WDZL.

To serve affiliates of the two networks not selected for The CW—namely its own—News Corporation announced the creation of MyNetworkTV on February 22, 2006, but CBS Television Stations announced that WSFB-TV would instead become an independent station. On May 8, 2006, CBS Corporation announced that it agreed to sell WSFB-TV (and several of its smaller-market stations) to Cerberus Capital Management for $185 million. Cerberus formed a new holding company for the stations, Four Points Media Group, which took over the operation of the stations through local marketing agreements in late-June 2007 until the group deal closed on January 10, 2008.

### **Sale to the Dorado Media Group and sales since 2017**

In September 2011, it was reported that the Dorado Media Group, the owner of WMFL and who also owns WMIM, was in talks to purchase WSFB-TV from Four Points for an estimated $7 million. In November, Dorado began managing WSFB-TV, under local marketing agreements following antitrust approval. The deal was completed on January 1, 2012. It initially continued to operate from separate studios several blocks east of the WMFL studios; by October 2013, WSFB-TV had moved in with WMFL.

On October 26, 2015, Dorado and Time Warner announced the formation of the ACME network, effective in June 2016. Following the sale of WMIM to the Dorado Media Group, it signed a ten-year affiliation agreement with eleven Dorado-owned Univision/UniMás stations, including WMIM. Even with Spanish programming, WMIM ranked among the four highest-rated stations in the Miami market in total day viewership, and WSFB-TV had moved MyNetworkTV programming to 12 a.m and was rarely promoted on-air as Dorado had slowly drawn a few of its MyNetworkTV stations away from its default primetime schedule for the block, and has continued to support prime time newscasts, which WMFL was producing for the station.

Following the launch of the ACME network on June 6, 2016, on September 1, Norfolk, Virginia-based TVX Broadcast Group announced it would acquire WSFB-TV for $116 million from Dorado. The sale was completed on March 2, 2017, making Dorado’s former "Fox 7 Plus" branding scheme dissolve for its MyNetworkTV stations, returning WSFB-TV to the complementary branding it had from 2006 until 2017. By October 2018, WSFB-TV moved out of the facilities shared with WMFL/WMIM.

## Technical information

### **Subchannels**

The station's digital signal is multiplexed:

 **40.2** | 480i
 **40.3** | WSFBTV3
 **40.4** | WSFBTV4
 **40.5** | WSFBTV5

### **Analog-to-digital conversion**

WSFB-TV discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over UHF channel 40, at midnight on February 18, 2009, one day after the original date for full-power television stations in the United States to transition from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate (which Congress had moved the previous month to June 12). The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 14. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 40.