Callsign: | WSBS-TV |
Branding: | Mega TV; Mega News |
Digital: | 3 (VHF) |
Virtual: | 22 |
Translators: | WSBS-CD 19 (UHF) Miami |
Owner: | Spanish Broadcasting System |
Licensee: | WSBS Licensing, Inc. |
Location: | Key West, Florida |
Country: | United States |
Callsign Meaning: | Spanish Broadcasting System |
Sister Stations: | WRMA, WCMQ-FM, WXDJ, WMFM, WRAZ-FM |
Erp: | 1 kW |
Haat: | 540NaN0 |
Facility Id: | 72053 |
Licensing Authority: | FCC |
WSBS-TV (channel 22) is a television station licensed to Key West, Florida, United States, serving as the flagship station of the Spanish-language network Mega TV. Owned and operated by Spanish Broadcasting System, the station maintains studios on Northwest 77th Avenue in Miami, and its transmitter is located on Bahama and Simonton Streets in Key West.
WSBS-CD (channel 19) in Miami operates as a low-power, Class A translator of WSBS-TV.
The station was originally licensed as WYDH on October 2, 1989; the calls were changed to WEYS on October 11, 1989, and the station itself first signed on the air in June 1993. WSBS-TV has had numerous callsign changes over the years. This has caused much confusion, both among viewers and writers. In many places, the station is still referred to as WEYS TeleNoticias, and WDLP Licensing, Inc. remained the licensee for several months after the call change to WSBS-TV. Some of these calls have been reused by low-power repeater stations, themselves often subject to similar callsign shuffles (for instance, the WDLP callsign is currently used by a repeater for rival WGEN-TV). On April 4, 2003, the station changed its call letters to WGEN-TV; it was then changed to WDLP-TV on September 24 of that year. The current WSBS-TV call letters were first adopted on July 1, 2004, before reverting to the WDLP-TV callsign on September 28, 2004. Prior to 2005, the station was co-owned with another Key West station, WGEN-TV, under the ownership of Sonia Broadcasting.
On March 1, 2006, the station became a charter station of Mega TV when the network was launched, and changed its callsign back to the previous WSBS-TV letters. Its original slate of programming includes productions aimed at young Hispanic viewers. Mega TV's format follows a very similar pattern traced by rival Telemundo station WSCV (channel 51) and Univision station WLTV (channel 23) decades earlier: by creating its own television personalities.
The station's signal is multiplexed:
Res. | Aspect | Short name | Programming | |
---|---|---|---|---|
22.1 | WSBS | |||
22.2 | VISLATN | Visión Latina (Spanish religious) |
WSBS-TV ended programming on its analog signal, on UHF channel 22, on June 12, 2009, the official date on which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal continued to broadcast on its pre-transition VHF channel 3,[1] using virtual channel 22. WSBS is one of the only television stations in the United States to operate its digital signal on the VHF low band, which is especially rare on channels 2 to 4 (54–72 MHz), due to interference that the band is subjected to. It chose to keep this channel in the first round of the digital channel elections.