WGBH-TV


WGBH-TV, virtual channel 2, is the primary Public Broadcasting Service member television station licensed to Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is the flagship property of the WGBH Educational Foundation, which also owns Boston's secondary PBS member WGBX-TV in Boston and Springfield, Massachusetts PBS member WGBY-TV, Class A Biz TV affiliate WFXZ-CD and public radio stations WGBH and WCRB in the Boston area, and WCAI radio on Cape Cod. WGBH-TV also effectively serves as one of two flagship stations of PBS, along with WNET in New York City. WGBH-TV, WGBX-TV, and the WGBH and WCRB radio stations share studios on Guest Street in northwest Boston's Brighton neighborhood; WGBH-TV's transmitter is located on Cabot Street in Needham, Massachusetts, on the former candelabra tower, which is shared with Fox affiliate WFXT and serves as an interim main and eventual full power backup facility for sister station WGBX-TV as well as CBS owned-and-operated station WBZ-TV, ABC affiliate WCVB-TV, NBC owned-and-operated station WBTS-CD and MyNetworkTV affiliate WSBK-TV.

History

The WGBH Educational Foundation received its first broadcast license for radio in April 1951 under the auspices of the Lowell Institute Cooperative Broadcasting Council, a consortium of local universities and cultural institutions, whose collaboration stems from an 1836 bequest by textile manufacturer John Lowell, Jr. that called for free public lectures for the citizens of Boston. WGBH first signed on the air on October 6, 1951, with a live broadcast of a performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
The Federal Communications Commission originally awarded a construction permit to Waltham-based electronics company Raytheon to build a television station that would transmit on VHF channel 2 in Boston. Raytheon planned to launch a commercial television station using the call letters WRTB-TV. However, after some setbacks and the cancellation of the construction permit license, WRTB never made it on the air, paving the way for the FCC to allocate channel 2 for non-commercial educational use. WGBH subsequently applied for and received a license to operate on that channel. The WGBH Educational Foundation obtained initial start-up funds for WGBH-TV from the Lincoln and Therese Filene Foundation. It is also thought by legend that Raytheon pushed quietly for the FCC to assign WGBH the channel 2 license after it was unable to utilize it.
WGBH-TV first signed on the air at 5:20 p.m. on May 2, 1955, becoming the first public television station in Boston and the first non-commercial television station to sign on in New England. The first program to air on the station was Come and See, a children's program hosted by Tony Saletan and Mary Lou Adams, which was filmed at Tufts Nursery Training School. Channel 2 originally served as a member station of the National Educational Television and Radio Center, which evolved into National Educational Television in 1963; for its first few years on the air, channel 2 only broadcast on Monday through Fridays between 5:30 and 9:00 p.m. It was originally based out of studio facilities located at 84 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was originally a roller skating rink. The station's callsign refers to Great Blue Hill, a location in Milton that served as the original location of WGBH-TV's transmitter facility and where the transmitter for WGBH radio continues to operate to this day.
In 1957, Hartford N. Gunn Jr. was appointed general manager of WGBH; he would later earn the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's Ralph Lowell Award for his achievements in programming development. Under Gunn, who resigned in February 1970 to become president of PBS, WGBH made significant investments in technology and programming to improve the station's profile and set out to make it a producer of public television programming. That February, WGBH expanded its programming to weekends for the first time, adding a four-hour schedule on Sunday afternoons from 2:30 to 6:30 p.m.. In March 1958, channel 2 began offering academic instructional television programs, with the debut of eight weekly science programs aimed at students in the sixth grade, which were televised “in some 48 separate school systems in and around the Boston area.” In November of that year, the station installed a new full-power transmitter donated by Westinghouse, which increased channel 2's transmitting power to 100,000 watts.
During the early morning hours of October 14, 1961, a large fire caused significant damage to the Cambridge studios of WGBH-TV and WGBH radio. Until the WGBH Educational Foundation was able to build a new studio complex to replace the destroyed former building, the two stations arranged to operate from temporary offices and had to produce their local programming from the studio facilities of various television stations in the Boston area and southern New Hampshire. WGBH-TV maintained a splintered operation, basing its master control operations at Newman Catholic Center at Boston University, production facilities at the studios of then CBS affiliate WHDH-TV on Morrissey Boulevard in Boston's Dorchester section, and its film and tape library was housed at the studios of fellow NET station WENH-TV in Durham, New Hampshire. WGBH was only off the air for one day after the fire.
Several area universities also chipped in to temporarily house other operations displaced by the fire: WGBH's scenic department was relocated to Northeastern University, its arts department was set up on the Boston University campus, and programming and production offices were based in Cambridge's Kendall Square neighborhood. WHDH, NBC affiliate WBZ-TV and ABC affiliate WNAC-TV also provided technical and production assistance to the WGBH television and radio stations until a permanent facility was built to reintegrate the stations' operations. On August 29, 1963, WGBH-TV and WGBH radio both began operating from a new studio facility for the stations that was built at 125 Western Avenue in Boston's Allston neighborhood.
On June 18, 1966, WGBH-TV relocated its transmitter to a broadcast tower in Needham, Massachusetts, The following year on September 25, 1967, WGBH-TV gained a sister television station in the Boston area, WGBX-TV, which has transmitted its signal from the Needham site since the station signed on. The launch of WGBX was one facet of a plan developed by the WGBH Educational Foundation in the late 1960s to operate a network of six non-commercial television stations around Massachusetts. However, these plans never materialized in their intended form; besides WGBX, the only other station that ultimately made it on the air was WGBY in Springfield, which launched in 1971. Three additional WGBH-owned stations were to have launched, all of which were slated to use the "WGB" prefix for their call letters; these included WGBW, which was to broadcast on channel 35 in Adams, along with two stations in New Bedford and Worcester.
On the night of April 5, 1968, WGBH-TV broadcast a James Brown concert from the Boston Garden, the night after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Boston Mayor Kevin White, who was worried that the concert would set off a riot, and certain that cancellation would be worse, contacted WGBH to air the concert on TV, and told the public to stay home and watch, helping prevent boycotts in the region. The concert would later be seen numerous times in the following days, helping the Boston area stay in peace.
In 1970, WGBH-TV became a member station of the Public Broadcasting Service, which was launched as an independent entity to supersede NET and assumed many of the functions of its predecessor network. Over time, WGBH became a pioneer in public television, producing many programs that were seen on NET and later, PBS, that either originated at the station's studio facilities or were otherwise produced by channel 2.
On October 31, 2003, WGBH launched Boston Kids & Family TV, a PBS Kids Channel-affiliated local cable service that was developed in partnership with the City of Boston. Available to Comcast and RCN subscribers, the service took over channel space previously occupied by one of the city's cable access channels, which carried a mix of public affairs programs, footage of city-sponsored events, and mayoral press conferences. Boston Kids & Family carried a mix of children's programs produced by WGBH and other distributors—which were scheduled to avoid simulcasts with WGBH-TV or WGBX-TV—daily from 7:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., and a repeating block of telecourse programs aimed at adults from 8:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. The channel intended to affiliate the subchannel with the planned PBS Kids Go! network, which was scheduled to launch in October 2006; however, PBS scuttled plans to launch the Kids Go! network prior to its launch. After PBS Kids ceased network operations, Boston Kids & Family was replaced by The Municipal Channel, which carried much of the programming offered by the service prior to the WGBH partnership.
As WGBH's operations grew, the 125 Western Avenue building proved inadequate to facilitate it and its sister stations; some administrative operations were moved across the street to 114 Western Avenue, with an overhead pedestrian bridge connecting the two buildings. By 2005, WGBH had facilities in more than a dozen buildings in the Allston area. The station's need for more studio space dovetailed with Harvard Business School's desire to expand its adjacent campus; Harvard already owned the land on which the WGBH studios were located, which the university had donated to WGBH for use to construct the Western Avenue facility in 1962 at a value of $250,000. WGBH built a new studio complex – designed by James Polshek & Partners – in nearby Brighton, which was inaugurated in June 2007. The building spans the block of Market Street from Guest Street to North Beacon Street, with radio studios facing pedestrian traffic on Market Street. The outside of the building carries a "digital mural" LED screen, which displays a different image each day to commuters on the passing Massachusetts Turnpike. Television and radio programs continued to be recorded at the Western Avenue studios until the WGBH stations completed the migration of their operations into the new facility in September 2007. The old Western Avenue studios were renovated by Harvard University in 2011 to house the Harvard Innovation Lab.
WGBH-TV has been digital-only since June 12, 2009.
WGBH-TV is best known for the synthesized sounder it uses at the beginning and end of programs it produces for PBS, created by Gershon Kingsley. It has been used in one form or another since 1971, and since 1977 has been accompanied by an animated version of the station's logo. Originally ten seconds long, it has been shortened to three seconds in recent years. Starting in late 2016, WGBH used a version of a logo with a techno remix at the end of children's programming. Previously, either a modified version of the normal logo or the normal logo was used at the end of children's programming.

Digital television

Digital channels

The station's digital signal is multiplexed. Note that due to WGBX's channel share agreement with NBC's WBTS-CD, WGBH instead carries the high definition feed identified as channel 44.1:
ChannelVideoAspectPSIP Short NameProgramming
2.11080iWGBH-HDMain WGBH programming / PBS
44.11080iWGBX-HDHD broadcast of WGBX-TV

In 2010, WGBH-TV became the first television station in the Boston market to provide a mobile DTV signal. It transmits two free-to-air channels using the ATSC-M/H standard, at 2.75 Mbit/s, with its first subchannel labelled as "WGBH CH 2".

WGBH-DT2

WGBH launched a digital subchannel on virtual channel 2.2 in December 2005, which initially served as an affiliate of the PBS World news and documentary service. In 2007, World programming was moved to the 44.2 subchannel of WGBX; WGBH replaced the network with a standard definition simulcast of its analog feed. The station discontinued the SD simulcast of channel 2.1 on April 17, 2012, when WGBH-DT2 re-assumed the local affiliation rights to World, which was simulcast on WGBX-DT2 for several months after the switch, before the former subchannel became its exclusive Boston outlet.

WGBH-DT3

WGBH launched a tertiary subchannel on virtual channel 2.3 in 2005, which offered high definition program content separate from that seen on the station's analog signal via the PBS-HD satellite feed; in 2008, the subchannel switched to a high-definition simulcast of the analog signal, with standard-definition programming presented in a windowboxed or letterboxed format. WGBH decommissioned the DT3 feed in 2010.

Spectrum auction repacking

In a list announcing the winning bids for stations which participated in the 2016 United States wireless spectrum auction released by the FCC on April 13, 2017, WGBH-TV was disclosed to have agreed to sell a portion of the broadcast spectrum allocated to its UHF channel 19 digital signal for a bid of $161,723,929; in a statement, the station said it would "use the proceeds to expand its educational services to children and students, further its in-depth journalism, and strengthen its modest endowment." The station also consigned to move its digital allocation to a low-band VHF channel; the FCC assigned VHF channel 5 as the post-repack digital allocation to which WGBH was reassigned once the repacking of auction and repack participant stations were occurred on August 2, 2019. WGBH-TV's post repack facility on VHF 5 is locating at the nearby American Tower owned facility on Cabot Street, also in Needham.

Related services

Television stations

WGBX-TV

WGBH-TV operates a secondary station in the Boston market, WGBX-TV, which signed on the air on September 25, 1967. The station's schedule focuses on program genres not covered by WGBH-TV. Reruns of programs aired the previous evening on WGBX and WGBH-TV also make up a portion of the station's programming schedule. WGBX also maintains several digital subchannels that rebroadcast programs produced by WGBH and other PBS member stations around the U.S.

WGBY-TV

WGBH Educational Foundation also owns and manages WGBY, the PBS member station for the Springfield, Massachusetts market, which signed on the air on September 26, 1971. That station utlilizes its own separate on-air branding and utilizes a similar logo to WGBH; however, it is run separately from the Boston operations of WGBH television and radio and WGBX-TV. Its digital channel carries similar programming to that featured on WGBX.

Translator station

WGBH formerly operated a low-power translator in Hyannis, W08CH, which later ceased operations. The translator's license and callsign were deleted by the FCC in 2004.

Media Access Group

WGBH is a leading provider of accessible media services for the deaf, hard-of-hearing, blind and visually impaired for use by commercial and public television producers, and to home video, websites, and movie theaters throughout the United States through the Media Access Group, a non-profit organization that was founded by the WGBH Educational Foundation in 1990. The unit originated with the founding of The Caption Center in 1972, which invented the method of closed captioning to improve access to television programs for the hearing impaired, and created the Rear Window Captioning System for films. Along with providing closed captions for television programs seen on channel 2 and its sister stations, the Media Access Group is a major captioning provider for programs on other broadcast television networks and several cable channels. It also developed the Descriptive Video Service, and is the main provider for audio description soundtracks that give visually impaired viewers details about events occurring on-screen within an individual program, which are commonly found on PBS, and select broadcast networks and cable channels.

Online resources

The internet is WGBH's third platform; all radio and television programs produced by the stations have web components that are available at wgbh.org. The WGBH website also incorporates "web-only" productions:
As a PBS member station, much of WGBH-TV's program schedule consists of educational and entertainment programming distributed by PBS to its member stations, including non-WGBH productions such as the PBS NewsHour, the Nightly Business Report, Sesame Street, Peg + Cat and Nature; it also carries programs distributed by American Public Television and other sources to fill its schedule, alongside programs produced for exclusive local broadcast in the Boston market.
WGBH features a mix of live-action and animated children's programs produced by the station and other distributors between 6:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., as well as on Saturday and Sunday mornings. The remainder of its weekday lineup includes a two-hour block of news and travel programs leading into prime time, with documentary, arts and entertainment programs provided by PBS shown Sunday through Fridays during prime time. Programming on Saturday afternoons focuses heavily on cooking and home improvement how-to shows, while Sunday afternoons focus mainly on travel shows along with some how-to programs.

Original productions

For the better part of its history, WGBH-TV has been a major producer of programming for PBS and its predecessor, NET. Channel 2 produces more than two-thirds of the programs that PBS distributes nationally to its member stations. Among them are longstanding PBS mainstays such as NOVA, Frontline, Masterpiece, American Experience, The Victory Garden, and This Old House.
Other notable programs originated by WGBH have included The French Chef, and The Scarlet Letter. The station has co-produced many other period dramas in conjunction with British production companies. Broadcasts of concerts by the Boston Symphony established the genre as a staple on television.
WGBH has also engaged in several experiments in programming and technology that have become standard in television, including:
WGBH alumni maintain a website where stories and photographs are shared; reunions were held in 2000 and 2006.