I hear everything is on track for the Action News family to be moving into their new digs in the next 4-6 weeks. Construction, which began in the summer of 2007, was completed some time ago. Now, it's the completion of all the wiring involved of an HD state-of-the-art type facility it is.
I'm told the station should go on-air from the new building by early September. As I wrote in late April, don't expect any drastic changes in the look of "Action News", only some tweaks here and there. The studio will definitely be larger which should allow some elbow room in future programming.
WPVI went on the air September 13th, 1947 as WFIL-TV. WFIL-TV was the home of Dick Clark's "American Bandstand" which hit our airwaves in 1952 and went national on the ABC network in 1957. WFIL-TV was also ABC's first affiliate.
A little known fact I found interesting? According to Wikipedia, channel 6 never carried ABC's new morning news show, "AM America", back in 1975 when ABC decided to create a morning news show to compete with NBC's "Today". ABC cancelled the ratings struggled "AM America" six months later and debuted "Good Morning America" in October of that year. WPVI only aired the first hour, opting instead, to air locally produced "Captain Noah and his Magical Ark" in the 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. hour. It took three years until ABC pursuaded WPVI to air the show in its entirety. Similiar situations happened with ABC's "Home" show (anchored by Robb Weller and Sandy Hill) and daytime soap, "The Edge of Night". "Home" was preempted entirely and finally hit WPVI's air only to have the first half hour preempted. "The Edge of Night" never aired on WPVI but instead, on independent stations in Philadelphia that were contracted by ABC to carry the show.
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Interesting...I never knew that about WPVI. I do remember that back in the 70s and 80s, KYW, then an NBC affiliate, would always be in hot water with the network because they preempted a lot of NBC programming.
That was probably partially due to KYW being a Group W station, and at that time Group W was pushing its weight around quite a bit in its attempt to be a "subnetwork" of sorts.
Who knew Philly was such a renegade town for TV!
I really wished CH 6 Had carried The Edge of Night as well,as a viewer Of ABC Daytime during those years I always felt Philly viewers did not get the whole soap package,when Edge premiered on ABC 12/1/75 wpvi was running a very successful syndicated game show and they did not want to give the half hour time slot back to ABC and they did not want to do a soap on a time delay,ch 48 picked up the soap on 12/22/75 on a 2 week delay until 4/23/82 when they dropped it and replaced it with a show called couples,WMGM picked up the show In Sept 1982 and carried it to the very end,WMGM signal does not travel far out of Atlantic county at the time,WMGM Ch 40 got the EDGE tapes bi-cycled from ch 36 in elmira,NY CH 48 wkbs got the edge tapes bi cycled from wtae ch 4 in pittsburgh until 1980 when wtae dropped the show causing ch 48 not to have a edge supplier for 2 weeks in Jan 1980,ABC got them the tapes after that but not sure from what ABC Station,WPVI could not send CH 48 The Edge of Night tapes because they (wpvi) did not subscribe to the show and the saga continues.....
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