WWRS-TV (channel 52) is a

religious Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatur ...

television station A television station is a set of equipment managed by a business, organisation or other entity, such as an amateur television (ATV) operator, that transmits video content and audio content via radio waves directly from a transmitter on the eart ...

licensed to

Mayville, Wisconsin Mayville is a city in Dodge County, Wisconsin, United States, located along the Rock River and the Horicon Marsh. The population was 5,154 at the 2010 census. Geography Mayville is located at (43.497044, -88.547871). According to the Unite ...

, United States, serving the

Milwaukee Milwaukee ( ), officially the City of Milwaukee, is both the most populous and most densely populated city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Milwaukee County. With a population of 577,222 at the 2020 census, Milwaukee ...

and

Madison Madison may refer to: People * Madison (name), a given name and a surname * James Madison (1751–1836), fourth president of the United States Place names * Madison, Wisconsin, the state capital of Wisconsin and the largest city known by this ...

areas as an owned-and-operated station of the

Trinity Broadcasting Network The Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) is an international Christian-based broadcast television network and the world's largest religious television network. TBN was headquartered in Costa Mesa, California, until March 3, 2017, when it sold its ...

(TBN). The station's studios are located on North Barker Road in Brookfield, and its transmitter is located in Hubbard. WWRS-TV's signal covers much of

southeastern The points of the compass are a set of horizontal, radially arrayed compass directions (or azimuths) used in navigation and cartography. A compass rose is primarily composed of four cardinal directions—north, east, south, and west—each se ...

and south-central Wisconsin, along with extended cable coverage throughout the area.

History

The station was formerly owned by National Minority Television, a ''de facto'' subsidiary of TBN that was used by the network to circumvent the

Federal Communications Commission The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisdicti ...

(FCC)'s television station ownership restrictions. While TBN founder

Paul Crouch Paul Franklin Crouch /kraʊtʃ/ (March 30, 1934 – November 30, 2013) was an American television evangelist. Crouch and his wife, Jan, founded the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) in 1973; the company has been described as "the world’s l ...

was NMTV's president, one of its directors was

African American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...

and the other was

Latino Latino or Latinos most often refers to: * Latino (demonym), a term used in the United States for people with cultural ties to Latin America * Hispanic and Latino Americans in the United States * The people or cultures of Latin America; ** Latin A ...

, which met the FCC's definition of a "minority-controlled" firm. In mid-2008, the station and its NMTV sisters came directly under TBN ownership. Like most TBN stations, WWRS simulcasts the TBN national feed for most of the day. TBN typically buys full-power stations mainly to get

must-carry In cable television, governments apply a must-carry regulation stating that locally licensed television stations must be carried on a cable provider's system. North America Canada Under current CRTC regulations, the lowest tier of service on ...

status on area cable systems, even though it offers almost no locally produced programming. However, WWRS airs FCC-required

public affairs programming In broadcasting, public affairs radio or television program Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of televi ...

(''Public Report'') from its Brookfield studios, with a nominal presence retained in at the station's transmitting facility and former main studio in Iron Ridge. The station also airs church services from throughout the area, usually on Friday morning.

Charter Communications Charter Communications, Inc., is an American telecommunications and mass media company with services branded as Spectrum. With over 32 million customers in 41 states, it is the second-largest cable operator in the United States by subscribe ...

, the dominant cable provider in the Madison area, and several communities in the Milwaukee area before the 2017 purchase of Time Warner Cable and merge into

Spectrum A spectrum (plural ''spectra'' or ''spectrums'') is a condition that is not limited to a specific set of values but can vary, without gaps, across a continuum. The word was first used scientifically in optics to describe the rainbow of colors ...

, added TBN and all of its digital subchannels to its systems in the area beginning late August 2007, within the provider's digital family tier of channels. However, beyond must-carry situations where WWRS-DT1 must be carried on analog cable in appropriate markets, the signal comes direct from TBN to the Spectrum headend, not through WWRS.

Subchannels

The station's digital signal continued to broadcasts on its pre-transition UHF channel 43. Through the use of

PSIP The Program and System Information Protocol (PSIP) is the MPEG (a video and audio industry group) and privately defined program-specific information originally defined by General Instrument for the DigiCipher 2 system and later extended for the AT ...

, digital television receivers display the station's

virtual channel In most telecommunications organizations, a virtual channel is a method of remapping the ''program number'' as used in H.222 Program Association Tables and Program Mapping Tables to a channel number that can be entered via digits on a receiver's ...

as its former UHF analog channel 52, which was among the high band UHF channels (52-69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition.

Must-carry

On April 1, 2002, a dispute arose between

Time Warner Cable Time Warner Cable, Inc. (TWC) was an American cable television company. Before it was acquired by Charter Communications on May 18, 2016, it was ranked the second largest cable company in the United States by revenue behind only Comcast, operat ...

's Milwaukee-area system and WWRS regarding must-carry regulations. Must-carry regulations require

cable television Cable television is a system of delivering television programming to consumers via radio frequency (RF) signals transmitted through coaxial cables, or in more recent systems, light pulses through fibre-optic cables. This contrasts with bro ...

providers within the Grade B contour of a full-power, full service television station to carry that station on their basic tier. When the dispute was settled, the FCC judged that the station was not required to be carried on the cable systems in the more distant counties of

Kenosha Kenosha () is a city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the seat of Kenosha County. Per the 2020 census, the population was 99,986 which made it the fourth-largest city in Wisconsin. Situated on the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan, Kenosh ...

Racine Jean-Baptiste Racine ( , ) (; 22 December 163921 April 1699) was a French dramatist, one of the three great playwrights of 17th-century France, along with Molière and Corneille as well as an important literary figure in the Western traditi ...

and

Walworth Walworth () is a district of south London, England, within the London Borough of Southwark. It adjoins Camberwell to the south and Elephant and Castle to the north, and is south-east of Charing Cross. Major streets in Walworth include the Old ...

. However, WWRS was able to exercise must-carry to the Time Warner Cable lineup in southeastern Wisconsin. This, combined with the lack of available channel space, caused the forced move of

PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly funded nonprofit organization and the most prominent provider of educat ...

member and

PBS Wisconsin PBS Wisconsin (formerly Wisconsin Public Television or WPT) is a state network of non-commercial educational television stations operated primarily by the Wisconsin Educational Communications Board and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. It c ...

flagship station WHA-TV (channel 21) to the digital cable tier in order to air WWRS on the basic cable tier.http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-02-1244A1.pdf

References

External links

* *
TBN.org/publicfile/WWRS/
(WWRS's

public file A public file (or public inspection file) is a collection of documents required by a broadcasting authority to be maintained by all broadcast stations under its jurisdiction. Such a file is required by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) i ...

)
History of Milwaukee television
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wwrs-Tv Television channels and stations established in 1997 WRS-TV 1997 establishments in Wisconsin Trinity Broadcasting Network affiliates Dodge County, Wisconsin