WSJU-TV (channel 31) was a

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 earth's s ...

San Juan, Puerto Rico San Juan ( , ; Spanish for "Saint John the Baptist, John") is the capital city and most populous Municipalities of Puerto Rico, municipality in the Commonwealth (U.S. insular area), Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, an unincorporated territory of the ...

, owned by Aerco Broadcasting Corporation. The station's studios were located at the IBC-AERCO building at 1554 Bori Street, Urb. Antonsanti in

Rio Piedras Rio or Río is the Portuguese and Spanish word for "river". The word also exists in Italian, but is largely obsolete and used in a poetical or literary context to mean "stream". Rio, RIO or Río may also refer to: Places United States * Rio, Fl ...

. Its transmitter was located at Cerro la Marquesa in Aguas Buenas. During most of the 2000s, the station's programming consisted mostly of music videos until it became an

affiliate Affiliation or affiliate may refer to: * Affiliate (commerce), a legal form of entity relationship used in Business Law * Affiliation (family law), a legal form of family relationship * Affiliate marketing * Affiliate network or affiliation platfo ...

Spanish Broadcasting System Spanish Broadcasting System, Inc. (SBS) is an American media company specializing in Spanish-speaking audiences. It is one of the largest owners and operators of radio stations in the United States. SBS is also invested in television and internet ...

's Mega TV on August 25, 2008. It was carried by

Dish Network DISH Network L.L.C., often referred to as DISH, an abbreviation for Digital Sky Highway, is an American provider of satellite television and IPTV services and wholly owned subsidiary of EchoStar Corporation. The company was originally establ ...

and Liberty Puerto Rico.

Prior use of channel 30

The ''

El Imparcial ''El Imparcial'', founded in 1918, was "an anti-'' Popular'', pro-Independence tabloid" in Puerto Rico ; abbreviated PR), officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, is a Government of Puerto Rico, self-governing Caribbean Geography of ...

'' newspaper built WITA-TV, which operated from June 1966 to June 1967. The station was a financial failure and left the air after a year of broadcasting. The construction permit and additional permits for stations in Ponce and Mayagüez were sold in 1969; the new owner came close to rebuilding the San Juan station and signing on the others but saw its finances unravel and never put any of them back on the air.

History

WRWR-TV received its construction permit on December 18, 1980. Its original permitholders, La Fe del Progreso Broadcasting Corporation, envisioned it as a religious station to be called (New Vision). The station began broadcasting on channel 30 on May 30, 1985. It was known as and broadcast older movies. It had translators on channels 16 (WTRA) in Mayagüez and 48 (

WIEC A ''veche'' was a popular assembly during the Middle Ages. The ''veche'' is mentioned during the times of Kievan Rus' and it later became a powerful institution in Russian cities such as Novgorod and Pskov, where the ''veche'' acquired great pro ...

) in Ponce. The station was in poor financial condition; by February 1987, it was noted that

infomercial An infomercial is a form of television commercial that resembles regular TV programming yet is intended to promote or sell a product, service or idea. It generally includes a toll-free telephone number or website. Most often used as a form of di ...

s and home shopping were taking up an increasing amount of its airtime. Bay Broadcasting attempted to get Mexican broadcaster

Televisa Grupo Televisa, S.A.B., simply known as Televisa, is a Mexican telecommunications and broadcasting company. A major Latin American mass media corporation, it often presents itself as the largest producer of Spanish-language content. In April ...

to invest in the station. The next month, it affiliated with

Univision Univision () is an American Spanish-language terrestrial television, free-to-air television network owned by TelevisaUnivision. It is the United States' largest provider of Spanish-language content. The network's programming is aimed at the L ...

. In the meantime, the station battled through bankruptcy proceedings initiated in Florida and later transferred to Puerto Rico courts. The station went off the air around 1991. It then reappeared around 1999 through 2000. It applied to assign its station license from Three Star Telecast to International Broadcasting Corp. Prior to and including the early 1990s, the call letters WSJU (now

WTCV WTCV (channel 18) is a television station in San Juan, Puerto Rico, serving as the U.S. territory's outlet for the Spanish-language network Mega TV. Owned and operated by Spanish Broadcasting System, it is sister to radio stations WZNT (93.7 ...

) were used by an

NBC The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is an American commercial broadcast television and radio network serving as the flagship property of the NBC Entertainment division of NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast. It is one of NBCUniversal's ...

affiliated station broadcasting on UHF channel 18 (Liberty channel 12) with studios in

Carolina, Puerto Rico Carolina (; ) is a Carolina barrio-pueblo, city and Municipalities of Puerto Rico, municipality on the northeastern coastal plain of Puerto Rico, immediately east of San Juan, Puerto Rico, San Juan and Trujillo Alto, Puerto Rico, Trujillo Alto, n ...

. Most of the programming was in English, making it one of at least two stations at the time to broadcast in English (the other was WPRV-TV, "The Bright Spot"). In addition to carrying local television programming like ''The Judy Gordon Show'' and '' Chicola y la Ganga'', WSJU carried a variety of NBC programs such as '' Wheel of Fortune'', ''

The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson ''The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson'' is an American television talk show broadcast by NBC. The show was the third installment of ''The Tonight Show''. Hosted by Johnny Carson, it aired from October 1, 1962 to May 22, 1992, replacing ''T ...

'' (and later

Jay Leno James Douglas Muir Leno ( ; born April 28, 1950) is an American television host, comedian, and writer. After doing stand-up comedy for years, he became the host of NBC's ''The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Tonight Show'' from 1992 until 200 ...

), and ''

Late Night with David Letterman ''Late Night with David Letterman'' is an American television talk show broadcast by NBC. The show is the first installment of the '' Late Night''. Hosted by David Letterman, it aired from February1, 1982 to June 25, 1993, and was replaced by ...

'' during his run at NBC. As with many stations serving the metropolitan area of San Juan and vicinity, the transmitter tower was located on top of the peak of El Yunque. Broadcasting hours ran from 6 a.m. to midnight daily. At the end of each broadcast day, the station played video rolls of the Puerto Rican and United States national anthems. Today, the Carolina studios for the former WSJU are owned and operated by the local affiliate of the Catholic Radio and Television Network, TeleOro channel 13 (

WORO-DT WORO-DT (channel 13), branded on-air as TeleOro Canal 13, is an educational–religious independent television station licensed to Fajardo, Puerto Rico. United States. The station is owned by Grupo RTC under Puerto Rico's Roman Catholic Church ...

; formerly WPRV-TV). WSJU has continuously been branded as "" from its time on channel 18 to its current seat on channel 30. In August 2008, SBS entered into an agreement with WSJU, which had formerly aired music videos, making it an affiliate of Mega TV. Mega TV Puerto Rico, as WSJU was branded from then on, carried a full prime time schedule as well as a Puerto Rico-focused newscast, . WSJU aired

s 15 hours a day (midnight to 3 p.m.). WSJU-TV ended regular programming on its analog signal, over

UHF Ultra high frequency (UHF) is the ITU designation for radio frequencies in the range between 300 megahertz (MHz) and 3 gigahertz (GHz), also known as the decimetre band as the wavelengths range from one meter to one tenth of a meter ...

channel 30, on June 12, 2009, the official date when 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 31. As part of the

SAFER Act The Short-term Analog Flash and Emergency Readiness Act, or SAFER Act, (, ) is a U.S. law that required the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to allow the continuation of full-power analog TV transmissions in 2009 for an additional 30 da ...

, WSJU-TV kept its analog signal on the air until June 26 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. Oftentimes these messages feature unsettling imagery, ideas or behaviors that are des ...

s from the

National Association of Broadcasters The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) is a Industry trade group, trade association and lobbying, lobby group representing the interests of commercial and non-commercial over-the-air radio and television broadcasting, broadcasters in th ...

. In August 2009, the station opened a

digital subchannel In broadcasting, digital subchannels are a method of transmitting more than one independent program stream simultaneously from the same digital radio or television station on the same radio frequency channel. This is done by using data compress ...

dedicated to music videos. This subchannel made its formal debut in September 2009 as PlayTV. Like competing music video channels TCV and VideoMax, PlayTV allowed viewers to send text messages to friends, which were displayed on air. PlayTV differentiated itself though, in that they assigned numeric codes to each music video, and viewers could send a text message to the station using those codes to request a particular video. In October 2009, WSJU opened a third subchannel airing programming from the

Dominican Republic The Dominican Republic is a country located on the island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles of the Caribbean Sea in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean. It shares a Maritime boundary, maritime border with Puerto Rico to the east and ...

. WSJU-TV became the dominant television station for young adults by airing music videos in partnership with major record companies. In 2010, WSJU-TV introduced new television stations that proved to have significant value to TV viewers. WSJU-TV also developed new media platforms (known as AiLive Network) to complement its electronic media offering, adding iPhone, Android, Internet, Games and many more digital platforms that received WSJU's host of stations regardless of viewers' locations. AiLive also allowed viewers to send text messages to friends, which were displayed on air. WSJU-TV reached 80 percent of the 1,000,000 households directly over-the-air and 100% of the territory via the three major cable providers. In April 2017, WSJU-TV announced that it would shut down in the next few months, after the

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

(FCC)'s

incentive auction The 2016 United States wireless spectrum auction, officially known as Auction 1001, allocated approximately 100 MHz of the United States Ultra High Frequency (UHF) spectrum formerly allocated to UHF television in the 600 MHz band. The sp ...

, without any channel sharing agreement. The station successfully sold its spectrum for $5,202,091. Due to the passage of

Hurricane Irma Hurricane Irma was an extremely powerful and devastating tropical cyclone that was the first Category 5 hurricane to strike the Leeward Islands on record, followed by Hurricane Maria, Maria two weeks later. At the time, it was considered ...

across Puerto Rico, WSJU-TV ceased broadcasting on September 5, 2017, ending nearly 34 years of operation. Its license was canceled by the FCC on June 26, 2018. On June 27, 2019, WSJU-TV's intellectual unit was moved to WSJU-LP in

Ceiba ''Ceiba'' is a genus of trees in the family Malvaceae, native to Tropics, tropical and Subtropics, subtropical areas of the Americas (from Mexico and the Caribbean to northern Argentina) and tropical West Africa. Some species can grow to tall ...

, which is now branded as Fresh 99.9 TV, for its music video programming, and W08EI-D, which broadcast TeleMaxx on channel 39.1 until November 1, 2020.

Subchannels

The station's signal was

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— ...

References

External links

Application to assign station license
{{Other US Territories Stations 1985 establishments in Puerto Rico 2018 disestablishments in Puerto Rico SJU-TV Television channels and stations disestablished in 2018 Television channels and stations established in 1985 SJU-TV