WXXI-TV (channel 21) is a

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

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 ...

Rochester, New York Rochester () is a city in the U.S. state of New York, the seat of Monroe County, and the fourth-most populous in the state after New York City, Buffalo, and Yonkers, with a population of 211,328 at the 2020 United States census. Located in W ...

, United States. It is owned by the

WXXI Public Broadcasting Council The WXXI Public Broadcasting Council is a community non-profit organization of some 36,000 subscribing members in the Rochester, New York metropolitan area, and owns that city's major public television and Community radio stations, a newspaper, an ...

alongside

NPR National Public Radio (NPR, stylized in all lowercase) is an American privately and state funded nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It differs from other ...

members WXXI (1370 AM) and WXXI-FM (91.5). The three outlets share studios at 280 State Street near downtown Rochester; WXXI-TV's transmitter is located on Pinnacle Hill on the border between Rochester and Brighton.

Programming

National productions

WXXI-TV's national public television productions include ''A Warrior in Two Worlds'', ''Echoes from the Ancients'', '' Out of the Fire'', '' Albert Paley: Man of Steel'', '' Biz Kid$'', and '' Flight to Freedom''. WXXI-TV also produced ''Assignment: The World'', a weekly current-events program for schools, which aired on approximately 100 public television stations nationwide, and was the nation's longest-running instructional television program. Due to funding cuts, it was canceled and its last episode aired on May 23, 2013.

Former programming

ThinkBright, broadcast from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. on 21.3 until the digital transition.

Technical information

Subchannels

WXXI-TV entered the digital era in September 2003 when it signed on with Rochester's first full-power digital television signal. The station's digital signal is

multiplexed In telecommunications and computer networking, multiplexing (sometimes contracted to muxing) is a method by which multiple analog or digital signals are combined into one signal over a shared medium. The aim is to share a scarce resource - a ...

: Channel 21.4, now PBS Kids since February 1, 2016, was originally a digital

standard definition Standard-definition television (SDTV, SD, often shortened to standard definition) is a television system which uses a resolution that is not considered to be either high or enhanced definition. "Standard" refers to it being the prevailing sp ...

simulcast of WXXI-TV's analog signal.

Analog-to-digital conversion

WXXI-TV discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over UHF channel 21, on June 12, 2009, the official date in which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 16. 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 21. As part of the SAFER Act, WXXI-TV kept its analog signal on the air until July 10, 2009 to inform viewers of the digital television transition through a loop of

public service announcement A public service announcement (PSA) is a message in the public interest disseminated by the media without charge to raise public awareness and change behavior. In the UK, they are generally called a public information film (PIF); in Hong Kong, ...

s from the National Association of Broadcasters. WXXI-TV had been awarded a $202,498 federal contract for an outreach initiative to help Rochester's over-the-air viewers prepare for the digital transition.

References

External links

*
John S. Porter papers
at the University of Maryland libraries. Porter served as the president and general manager from 1966 to 1969. {{DEFAULTSORT:Wxxi-Tv XXI-TV PBS member stations Television channels and stations established in 1966 1966 establishments in New York (state)