WSCV
Encyclopedia
WSCV Telemundo
51 is the Telemundo
O&O that serves the Miami - Fort Lauderdale area and licensed to Fort Lauderdale. The transmitter is located in Miramar
. The station also serves as the de facto Telemundo affiliate for the West Palm Beach market. The station is owned by NBCUniversal along with NBC O&O WTVJ
channel 6. Its call letters, when pronounced in Spanish read "Doble-U Ese Se Ve" which means "That one is seen" in English. On March 5, 2008, WSCV became the first Spanish station in the state of Florida to begin transmission of their newscasts in high definition
.
Another company acquired the station in January 1972 and returned it to air February 14, 1972 as WKID-TV. The format was a part-English, part-Spanish format. It would later be acquired by an investment group headed by William F. Johns and Alvin Koenig in 1976, after WKID's previous owners went bankrupt.
During the late-1970s, WKID aired Spanish programming during the day and a slate of old English-language films and sitcoms during the overnight hours. With all other Miami-area stations off the air overnights, WKID's late-night programming was a cult hit among South Florida night owls. Dubbed The All Night Show, WKID's late-night block mixed films, TV series, music videos and old cartoons together, along with special guests. The "All Night Show" was hosted by Dave Dixon, an icon from that era of South Florida UHF television. It was said that WKID's All Night Show provided the inspiration for USA Network
's similar late-night block, Night Flight
. http://www.radio-info.com/mods/board?Board=tv-classic&Post=681446&page= During this era, cable systems that carried WCIX
outside of the Miami market (especially Tampa Bay and Orlando) carried WKID late-nights, after WCIX signed off for the night.
In 1980, the group sold WKID to Oak Industries, a cable television equipment manufacturer and operator of ON-TV
, a subscription television service, which was offered in the evenings for a monthly subscription fee, required set-top decoder box, and outside antenna. Programming during the day consisted of Financial News Network
content, a horse racing show hosted by Bob Savage in the early evening, followed by a brief ON-TV promo and switch to scrambled mode, thus beginning that evening's encoded ON-TV broadcast. With the expansion of cable TV, ON-TV proved an ill fated venture.
Julio Rumbaut, a US Spanish language media entrepeuneur led the acquisition and operations of WSCV-TV, by Blair Broadcasting (under their BlairSpan subsidiary) which acquired WKID from Oak and changed the station's callsign to WSCV; new Spanish language programming commenced in the Spring of 1985 and WSCV positioned its programming as a local, independent Miami-targeted alternative to Spanish International Network affiliate WLTV
.
WSCV served as a catalyst and one of the flagship stations of Telemundo as in 1986, The Reliance Group acquired WSCV and Blair's other Spanish-language stations including WNJU
in New York, KVEA
in Los Angeles
and WKAQ-TV
in San Juan, Puerto Rico
and used them to launch the new Telemundo
network in 1987; at this point, WSCV became a ratings contender against long-time leader WLTV. In 2001, WSCV and Telemundo were purchased by NBC
.
Ambrosio Hernandez who had worked at several stations in Chicago complementing the team which included weathercaster Angel Martin and sportscaster Rene Giraldo.
Maria Montoya and Ambrosio Hernandez, who are still the main anchors at WSCV, are presently the anchor team with the most longevity of any US television anchor team in any language, while Rene Giraldo is a sportscaster on the Telemundo Network.
WSCV was positioned as the "Cuban" station in stark contrast to WLTV which aired Mexican programming and was therefore perceived, in some circles, as less anti-Castro. Their first on-air slogan was "El Canal de Miami' followed by "Somos la gente de Aqui", (We are (Miami's) people).
In 1988 recently hired General Manager Alfredo Duran announced that Univision's local reporting star Alina Mayo Azze, would join the WSCV news team. Her heralded arrival was dimmed when Duran, announced the hire of WLTV's main anchor Leticia Callava to co-anchor the 6 and 11 news programs with Azze. Callava, regarded as the most respected news anchor on Spanish language television, was fired by WLTV management shortly after Duran defected to Telemundo. Callava and Duran were then a couple and this triggered a series of events that would change the Latin television landscape in Miami. Several news reporters and both Montoya and Hernandez bolted to WLTV as the station tried to reinvent itself.
Under Duran's administration Noticiero 51 was revamped as Noticentro 51 with both Azze and Callava, the first time that two women anchored a Spanish language news program together in Miami. Noticentro 51, became a source for news coverage and won 12 Emmy Awards in the late '80s.
Two years later it was announced that Mayo-Azze was to leave the station. Within months she was anchoring again, but now across town for WLTV. Azze's position was filled by Nicolas Kasanzew, a news anchor from Argentina who became famous covering the Falklands War
for the state-run network ATC (Argentina Televisora Color). Kasanzew was later removed from the anchor desk to make room for Ambrosio Hernandez who decided to make a comeback to Channel 51.
The backstage drama between Callava and Hernandez was more intriguing than what viewers saw on the newscast. Callava and Hernandez did not hit it off in spite of chemistry between the two of them. It was rumored that each would count the stories assigned to them to be on even ground.
In 2001, Noticiero 51 began to expand their news presence in the mornings and on weekends as part of Telemundo's strategic plans. In addition to Miami, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles also added newscasts to their programming. In Miami, Montoya was rehired again by Channel 51 to anchor the morning show.
Two years later Hernandez would be welcoming Montoya back to the 6 and 11 o'clock newscasts as they had done in the late 1980s. After 25 years as Miami's most beloved television personality - 10 years at WLTV and 15 at WSCV, Callava's contract was not renewed when allegedly she refused to take a paycut.
She is now the official on-camera spokesperson for Care Plus, a healthcare conglomerate in Miami owned by Humana. Duran is currently the General Manager for E! Entertainment Television in Latin America.
On March 5, 2008, WSCV began broadcasting their local newscasts in High Definition, the first Spanish language television station in the Miami/Ft. Lauderdale market to do so. WSCV's newscasts will continue to be broadcast in HD for the foreseeable future since a proposed 2008 sale of sister station WTVJ to Post-Newsweek Stations
fell through. For over a year, only the newscasts were in 16:9 widescreen
HD while all other programming remained in upconverted
and pillarboxed 4:3 Standard Definition
. That changed on April 23, 2009 when Telemundo became the first Spanish-language network serving the U.S. to begin airing its programming in HD.
Univision 23; numbers as a result of the so called "book" (sweeps) on May 2006.
Telemundo
Telemundo is an American television network that broadcasts in Spanish. The network is the second-largest Spanish-language content producer in the world, and the second-largest Spanish-language network in the United States, behind Univision....
51 is the Telemundo
Telemundo
Telemundo is an American television network that broadcasts in Spanish. The network is the second-largest Spanish-language content producer in the world, and the second-largest Spanish-language network in the United States, behind Univision....
O&O that serves the Miami - Fort Lauderdale area and licensed to Fort Lauderdale. The transmitter is located in Miramar
Miramar, Florida
Miramar is a city in Broward County, Florida, United States. The city was named after the Miramar district of Havana, Cuba. As of the 2010 census, the population was 122,041...
. The station also serves as the de facto Telemundo affiliate for the West Palm Beach market. The station is owned by NBCUniversal along with NBC O&O WTVJ
WTVJ
WTVJ, virtual channel 6 , is an owned-and-operated television station of the NBC television network, located in Broward County. WTVJ shares its TV studio and office facility with co-owned Telemundo station WSCV in Miramar, Florida, and its transmitter is located near Sun Life Stadium in north...
channel 6. Its call letters, when pronounced in Spanish read "Doble-U Ese Se Ve" which means "That one is seen" in English. On March 5, 2008, WSCV became the first Spanish station in the state of Florida to begin transmission of their newscasts in high definition
High-definition television
High-definition television is video that has resolution substantially higher than that of traditional television systems . HDTV has one or two million pixels per frame, roughly five times that of SD...
.
History
Channel 51 began operations on December 6, 1968 as WSMS-TV, under the ownership of Gold Coast Telecasting; it would go dark August 10, 1970.Another company acquired the station in January 1972 and returned it to air February 14, 1972 as WKID-TV. The format was a part-English, part-Spanish format. It would later be acquired by an investment group headed by William F. Johns and Alvin Koenig in 1976, after WKID's previous owners went bankrupt.
During the late-1970s, WKID aired Spanish programming during the day and a slate of old English-language films and sitcoms during the overnight hours. With all other Miami-area stations off the air overnights, WKID's late-night programming was a cult hit among South Florida night owls. Dubbed The All Night Show, WKID's late-night block mixed films, TV series, music videos and old cartoons together, along with special guests. The "All Night Show" was hosted by Dave Dixon, an icon from that era of South Florida UHF television. It was said that WKID's All Night Show provided the inspiration for USA Network
USA Network
USA Network is an American cable television channel launched in 1971. Once a minor player in basic cable, the network has steadily gained popularity because of breakout hits like Monk, Psych, Burn Notice, Royal Pains, Covert Affairs, White Collar, Monday Night RAW, Suits, and reruns of the various...
's similar late-night block, Night Flight
Night Flight (TV series)
Night Flight is a variety show that originated on the USA Network. An eclectic mix of short films, cartoons, B movies, stand up comedy, documentaries, music videos and more, Night Flight was broadcast, in various incarnations, from 1981 to 1996....
. http://www.radio-info.com/mods/board?Board=tv-classic&Post=681446&page= During this era, cable systems that carried WCIX
WFOR-TV
WFOR-TV, virtual channel 4.1 , is the CBS owned-and-operated station in Miami, Florida. WFOR shares its TV studio facilities with sister station WBFS-TV in Doral, near Miami International Airport, and its transmitter is located in Miramar.WFOR-TV also previously had two translator stations in the...
outside of the Miami market (especially Tampa Bay and Orlando) carried WKID late-nights, after WCIX signed off for the night.
In 1980, the group sold WKID to Oak Industries, a cable television equipment manufacturer and operator of ON-TV
ON-TV
ON-TV, also known as National Subscription Television, was a subscription television service launched in 1977 by Oak Industries, Norman Lear's Chartwell Enterprises and Jerry Perenchio. Oak was a manufacturer of satellite and pay-TV decoders and equipment...
, a subscription television service, which was offered in the evenings for a monthly subscription fee, required set-top decoder box, and outside antenna. Programming during the day consisted of Financial News Network
Financial News Network
The Financial News Network was a television network that operated throughout the United States during the 1980s.-Founding:Financial News Network was founded in 1981 by two men: Rodney Buchser, who had been general manager of KWHY, Channel 22 in Los Angeles and Glenn Taylor. The concept originated...
content, a horse racing show hosted by Bob Savage in the early evening, followed by a brief ON-TV promo and switch to scrambled mode, thus beginning that evening's encoded ON-TV broadcast. With the expansion of cable TV, ON-TV proved an ill fated venture.
Julio Rumbaut, a US Spanish language media entrepeuneur led the acquisition and operations of WSCV-TV, by Blair Broadcasting (under their BlairSpan subsidiary) which acquired WKID from Oak and changed the station's callsign to WSCV; new Spanish language programming commenced in the Spring of 1985 and WSCV positioned its programming as a local, independent Miami-targeted alternative to Spanish International Network affiliate WLTV
WLTV
WLTV-DT is a Univision owned and operated station serving Spanish-speaking viewers in South Florida. The station is located in Doral, where Univision's production facilities are also located. The transmitter is located in Miami Gardens...
.
WSCV served as a catalyst and one of the flagship stations of Telemundo as in 1986, The Reliance Group acquired WSCV and Blair's other Spanish-language stations including WNJU
WNJU
WNJU, channel 47, is the flagship station of the Spanish-language Telemundo television network, licensed to Linden, New Jersey and serving the Tri-State area television market. WNJU is owned by NBCUniversal, and is one-half of a duopoly with NBC network flagship WNBC-TV...
in New York, KVEA
KVEA
KVEA is a Spanish-language television station in the Los Angeles area owned and operated by NBC Universal and the West Coast flagship station of the Telemundo network. It was the first mainland U.S. station owned by Telemundo at the network's launch in the late 1980's...
in Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California
Los Angeles , with a population at the 2010 United States Census of 3,792,621, is the most populous city in California, USA and the second most populous in the United States, after New York City. It has an area of , and is located in Southern California...
and WKAQ-TV
WKAQ-TV
WKAQ-TV is a full-power television station located in San Juan, Puerto Rico transmitting over digital 2.1. The station is owned and operated by NBCUniversal and is branded simply as Telemundo....
in San Juan, Puerto Rico
San Juan, Puerto Rico
San Juan , officially Municipio de la Ciudad Capital San Juan Bautista , is the capital and most populous municipality in Puerto Rico, an unincorporated territory of the United States. As of the 2010 census, it had a population of 395,326 making it the 46th-largest city under the jurisdiction of...
and used them to launch the new Telemundo
Telemundo
Telemundo is an American television network that broadcasts in Spanish. The network is the second-largest Spanish-language content producer in the world, and the second-largest Spanish-language network in the United States, behind Univision....
network in 1987; at this point, WSCV became a ratings contender against long-time leader WLTV. In 2001, WSCV and Telemundo were purchased by NBC
NBC
The National Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network and former radio network headquartered in the GE Building in New York City's Rockefeller Center with additional major offices near Los Angeles and in Chicago...
.
Newscasts
The station's news identity began with Noticiero 51 a las 6 anchored by Cuban Lucy Pereda and Eduardo Arango. Pereda left a year later to anchor for Univision's first morning show, Mundo Latino, co-anchored by Frank Moro, a Cuban soap star who left to go back to soaps in Mexico. He was substituted by Jorge Ramos, now Univision's main news anchor. The station hired Maria Montoya, a former actress who had arrived in Miami as part of the Mariel boatlift of 1980 andAmbrosio Hernandez who had worked at several stations in Chicago complementing the team which included weathercaster Angel Martin and sportscaster Rene Giraldo.
Maria Montoya and Ambrosio Hernandez, who are still the main anchors at WSCV, are presently the anchor team with the most longevity of any US television anchor team in any language, while Rene Giraldo is a sportscaster on the Telemundo Network.
WSCV was positioned as the "Cuban" station in stark contrast to WLTV which aired Mexican programming and was therefore perceived, in some circles, as less anti-Castro. Their first on-air slogan was "El Canal de Miami' followed by "Somos la gente de Aqui", (We are (Miami's) people).
In 1988 recently hired General Manager Alfredo Duran announced that Univision's local reporting star Alina Mayo Azze, would join the WSCV news team. Her heralded arrival was dimmed when Duran, announced the hire of WLTV's main anchor Leticia Callava to co-anchor the 6 and 11 news programs with Azze. Callava, regarded as the most respected news anchor on Spanish language television, was fired by WLTV management shortly after Duran defected to Telemundo. Callava and Duran were then a couple and this triggered a series of events that would change the Latin television landscape in Miami. Several news reporters and both Montoya and Hernandez bolted to WLTV as the station tried to reinvent itself.
Under Duran's administration Noticiero 51 was revamped as Noticentro 51 with both Azze and Callava, the first time that two women anchored a Spanish language news program together in Miami. Noticentro 51, became a source for news coverage and won 12 Emmy Awards in the late '80s.
Two years later it was announced that Mayo-Azze was to leave the station. Within months she was anchoring again, but now across town for WLTV. Azze's position was filled by Nicolas Kasanzew, a news anchor from Argentina who became famous covering the Falklands War
Falklands War
The Falklands War , also called the Falklands Conflict or Falklands Crisis, was fought in 1982 between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the disputed Falkland Islands and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands...
for the state-run network ATC (Argentina Televisora Color). Kasanzew was later removed from the anchor desk to make room for Ambrosio Hernandez who decided to make a comeback to Channel 51.
The backstage drama between Callava and Hernandez was more intriguing than what viewers saw on the newscast. Callava and Hernandez did not hit it off in spite of chemistry between the two of them. It was rumored that each would count the stories assigned to them to be on even ground.
In 2001, Noticiero 51 began to expand their news presence in the mornings and on weekends as part of Telemundo's strategic plans. In addition to Miami, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles also added newscasts to their programming. In Miami, Montoya was rehired again by Channel 51 to anchor the morning show.
Two years later Hernandez would be welcoming Montoya back to the 6 and 11 o'clock newscasts as they had done in the late 1980s. After 25 years as Miami's most beloved television personality - 10 years at WLTV and 15 at WSCV, Callava's contract was not renewed when allegedly she refused to take a paycut.
She is now the official on-camera spokesperson for Care Plus, a healthcare conglomerate in Miami owned by Humana. Duran is currently the General Manager for E! Entertainment Television in Latin America.
On March 5, 2008, WSCV began broadcasting their local newscasts in High Definition, the first Spanish language television station in the Miami/Ft. Lauderdale market to do so. WSCV's newscasts will continue to be broadcast in HD for the foreseeable future since a proposed 2008 sale of sister station WTVJ to Post-Newsweek Stations
Post-Newsweek Stations
Post-Newsweek Stations is the official name of the broadcasting division of the Washington Post Company and is a self-contained corporation within that company...
fell through. For over a year, only the newscasts were in 16:9 widescreen
Widescreen
Widescreen images are a variety of aspect ratios used in film, television and computer screens. In film, a widescreen film is any film image with a width-to-height aspect ratio greater than the standard 1.37:1 Academy aspect ratio provided by 35mm film....
HD while all other programming remained in upconverted
Video scaler
A video scaler is a device for converting video signals from one size or resolution to another: usually "upscaling" or "upconverting" a video signal from a low resolution to one of higher resolution A video scaler is a device for converting video signals from one size or resolution to another:...
and pillarboxed 4:3 Standard Definition
Standard-definition television
Sorete-definition television is a television system that uses a resolution that is not considered to be either enhanced-definition television or high-definition television . The term is usually used in reference to digital television, in particular when broadcasting at the same resolution as...
. That changed on April 23, 2009 when Telemundo became the first Spanish-language network serving the U.S. to begin airing its programming in HD.
List of Newscasts
- Buenos Dias (Mondays through Fridays from 5–7 am)
- Acceso Total (Mondays through Fridays from 11:30 am–12 noon)
- Telemundo 51 a las Seis (Mondays through Fridays from 6–6:30 pm)
- Telemundo 51 a las Once (Mondays through Fridays from 11–11:30 pm)
- Telemundo 51 en el Fin de Semana (Saturdays and Sundays from 5:30–6 pm and from 11–11:30 pm)
Strong Ratings
For the first time in its history, WSCV Telemundo 51 ranked as the #1 news station at 11 o'clock Monday to Friday, beating the other newscasts and beating main Spanish language rival WLTVWLTV
WLTV-DT is a Univision owned and operated station serving Spanish-speaking viewers in South Florida. The station is located in Doral, where Univision's production facilities are also located. The transmitter is located in Miami Gardens...
Univision 23; numbers as a result of the so called "book" (sweeps) on May 2006.