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WVPX-TV is the Cleveland, Ohio affiliate of the i television network (formerly known as Pax TV). It is licensed to Akron, with a transmitter located on the west side of Akron just north of Rolling Acres Mall.

The station is owned by Paxson Communications, and broadcasts its analog signal on UHF channel 23. It runs infomercials and religious programming before 5 p.m.; and family dramas, first-run talk shows, family movies, and reality shows after 5 p.m.

History

The station signed on air for the first time in 1953 as WAKR-TV, broadcasting from a transmitter located on the First National Tower in Akron on channel 49. The station was licensed to Summit Radio Corp., the family-owned business of S. Bernard Berk, which also owned WAKR-AM 1590. Summit had applied to the FCC in 1947 for a television license to operate on channel 11, the only channel allocated to Akron. However, before the license was issued, the FCC implemented a freeze on further television licenses while it undertook a study of what to do with the VHF spectrum. When the freeze was lifted in 1952, the FCC decided to collapse Akron and Canton into the Cleveland market. It limited the number of VHF channels in the Cleveland area to three--channels 3, 5 and 8 (changed from 4, 5 and 9) and to grant licenses to further stations only in the UHF spectrum. Summit was able to secure a license to operate on channel 49.

Being a UHF television station in a predominantly VHF market was extremely difficult in the 1950s. Almost all television sets sold were not capable of tuning UHF stations, and special converters and antennas were required to receive the station's signal. About half of the UHF stations in the country that started in the 1950s failed. The FCC didn't require television sets to include UHF capability until 1964. WAKR-TV was fortunate to obtain an affiliation with ABC, which had some problems in the early 1950s obtaining clearances for its full schedule on WEWS-TV, which was also a Dumont affiliate. WAKR-TV also focused on Akron area programming to distinguish itself from the Cleveland stations. The station struggled, however, and Summit had to rely for its profitability on its very successful AM station. In 1961 Summit Radio declared that Channel 49 had from the beginning "suffered very substantial operating losses."

When the FCC rules were changed to require all television sets to have UHF tuners, the fortunes of many UHF stations, including WAKR, began to change. Eventually, the station became moderately more successful, helped by its move from channel 49 to channel 23 in 1967.

However, WAKR's fortunes declined when WEWS began carrying more ABC shows. The syndicated shows it carried were second-rate older programs since Cleveland's stations already picked the choices clean. It tried to focus on its unique local programming including its Akron-based newscasts using resources shared with WAKR-AM. It boasted the only newscast focused on Akron and Canton news. "Our local programming is geared to giving Akron what it wants—news, advertising, announcements and local shows all about Akron," then-station manager Bob Bostian said as WAKR-TV marked its 25th anniversary in 1978 .

The station also suffered from overall low ratings because it operated in the shadow of the Cleveland market. Several studies indicated that even when viewers watched WAKR, they assumed they were watching WEWS, since both stations had a large amount of common programming from ABC. Furthermore, Akron was not a separate market for ratings purposes, but was only a small part of the Cleveland market. When WAKR-TV was able to obtain a substantial share of the Akron viewers, it still had a small rating in the Cleveland market as a whole.

When WAKR-TV signed on, it was Akron's only network affiliate. Had even one more network station opened up around the same time, or even a network affiliate in Canton, the two cities may well have broken off from Cleveland and formed their own market. This market would have been among the top 100 markets in the country and would have probably served much of East-central and North-central Ohio, where the Cleveland stations have poor reception. An Akron-Canton market would have been in the same situation as Topeka, Kansas; which is its own market even though the Kansas City stations reach it fairly easily, or Dayton, Ohio where Cincinnati stations can be recieved.

As it was, WAKR-TV was forced to compete with the Cleveland stations with the odds stacked heavily against it, especially since it was in the shadow of WEWS, one of ABC's strongest affiliates. It was also in constant jeopardy of losing its ABC affiliation. E.W. Scripps Company, owners of WEWS, constantly suggested to ABC that it pull its affiliation from WAKR-TV, so that WEWS did not have to compete with another ABC affiliate in the same market.

In 1986, the station lost the support of WAKR-AM when the Summit Radio group was broken up. Summit kept the TV station and changed the calls to WAKC (for AKron-Canton) on November 3, 1986. In 1993 ValueVision, a company specializing in home-shopping programming, bought WAKC. Immediately speculation arose that the station would drop its newscasts. ValueVision kept the newscasts, though the quality was uneven at best.

Finally, in 1996, Paxson Communications—another specialist in shopping shows—bought WAKC. It dropped the ax on local news and ended the station's affiliation with ABC. It became part of the PAX TV network that Paxson launched in 1998, carrying the entire PAX network schedule, with practically no local programming. The station assumed its current calls on January 13, 1998.

The Akron-based newscast was resurrected in June 2001 when Paxson entered a local marketing agreement with Cleveland's NBC affiliate, WKYC-TV, as part of an overall corporate deal with NBC. WKYC opened an Akron studio and produced a 6:30 and 10:00 p.m. newscast nightly (as Pax 23 News), featuring WKYC reporters assigned to stories in the Akron/Canton area. Weather reports were supplied by WKYC's meteorologists in their Cleveland studio. The newscasts were anchored by Eric Mansfield, who had been a reporter for the old WAKC newscasts from 1992 to 1994. When the PAX network rebranded as "i" on June 30, 2005, WVPX dropped the newscasts, but the newscasts from WKYC's Akron Bureau are still seen on Time Warner Cable's channel 23 (unrelated to WVPX, which is carried on a different cable channel).

External links

• www.paxcleveland.tv
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• Photo of WVPX Transmitter from Google Local

• I network affiliates
• Akron, Ohio