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WVPX 23 is an affiliate of the i television network (formerly known as Pax TV). It is licensed to Akron, Ohio, and is technically part of the Cleveland television market, but its main area of service is Akron and Canton.
It is owned by Paxson Communications. 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.
The station began as WAKR-TV broadcasting from a transmitter located in the First National Tower in Akron on channel 49 in 1953. The station was licensed to Summit Radio Corp., the family-owned business of S. Bernard Berk, which also owned WAKR radio. Summit had applied to the FCC in 1947 for a television license to operate on channel 11, the channel allocated by the FCC to the Akron-Canton market. 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 limit 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, and it started broadcasting in 1953.
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. WAKR-TV was fortunate to obtain an affiliation with ABC which had some problems in the early 1950s obtaining clearance for its schedule from WEWS, 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 WAKR 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-TV began to change. Eventually, the station became moderately more successful, helped by its move from channel 49 to channel 23 in 1967.
However, the station never did well as an ABC affiliate due to being in the Cleveland television market area, which already had an ABC affiliate WEWS on channel 5. And when channel 23 was an ABC affiliate, even the syndicated shows 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 Akron/Canton newscast available. "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 [1].
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 Channel 23, they assumed they were watching Channel 5, 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.
Akron is somewhat unique in that its quite a large city in its own right, but due to being so close to a larger city, Cleveland, it does not have its own television market. It is part of the Cleveland/Akron (Canton) DMA, but most of the Cleveland-based network affiliates do not bill Akron in their logo at all. Several other U.S. cities share this trait. Newark, NJ is another large city without it's own TV market, it is too close to New York City to have it's own. Most cities Akron's size have 5 or 6 commercial TV stations, such as Dayton, OH, Des Moines, IA, Wichita, KS, and many others. However, these cities are all isolated from nearby larger cities, unlike Akron.
When WAKR-TV went on-air in 1953 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), Akron/Canton together may well have established their own TV market. This market would have been in the top 100 in size and would probably serve much of East-central and North-central Ohio where the Cleveland stations have poor reception.
As it was, WAKR-TV was forced to compete in a market with the Cleveland stations that had a signal that better covered the Cleveland area. It was also in constant jeopardy of losing its ABC affiliation. The owners of WEWS 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 radio station was sold by Summit Radio. The call letters were changed to WAKC 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 the WVPX call sign on January 13, 1998.
The Akron based newscast was resurrected in June 2001 when Paxson entered into a operating agreement with Cleveland's WKYC. 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).