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WLS-TV, virtual channel 7 (UHF digital channel 44), is an ABC owned-and-operated television station located in Chicago, Illinois, United States. The station is owned by the ABC Owned Television Stations subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. WLS-TV maintains studio facilites located on North State Street in the Chicago Loop, and its transmitter is located atop the Willis Tower on South Wacker Drive. ==History== The station first signed on the air on September 17, 1948 as WENR-TV. It was the third television station to sign on in the Chicago market (behind WGN-TV (channel 9), which debuted six months earlier in April, and WBKB (channel 4, now WBBM-TV on channel 2), which signed on in September 1946). As one of the original ABC-owned stations on channel 7, it was the second station to begin operations, after WJZ-TV (now WABC-TV) in New York City (its sister stations in Detroit, San Francisco and Los Angeles signed on within a year of WENR's launch). The station's original call letters were taken from co-owned radio station WENR (890 AM), which served as an affiliate of the ABC Radio Network (WENR would eventually merge with WLS radio, with which it shared a frequency under a time-sharing arrangement until ABC purchased a 50% interest in WLS in 1954). In February 1953, ABC merged with United Paramount Theatres (UPT), the former theater division of Paramount Pictures. UPT subsidiary Balaban and Katz owned WBKB (which shared a CBS affiliation with WGN-TV). The newly merged American Broadcasting-Paramount Theatres, as the company was known then, could not keep both stations because of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations then enforced that forbade the common ownership of two television stations licensed to the same market. As a result, WBKB's channel 4 license was sold to CBS, which subsequently changed that station's call letters to WBBM-TV; that outlet would move to VHF channel 2 several months later on July 5, 1953. The old WBKB's on-air and behind-the-scenes staff stayed at the new WBBM-TV, while the WBKB call letters and management moved to channel 7 (from 1965 to 1968, a "-TV" suffix was included in the station's calls, modifying it to WBKB-TV). Sterling "Red" Quinlan served as the station's general manager from the early 1950s to the mid-1960s,〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.chicagotelevision.com/RED.htm )〕 and became a giant in early Chicago television. Quinlan was instrumental in starting the careers of Tom Duggan, Frank Reynolds and Bob Newhart. The station courageously aired ''The Tom Duggan Show'' in the mid-1950s, which became the most popular show in the Chicago market, far outdrawing other network competition. Channel 7 had its call letters changed to WLS-TV on October 7, 1968,〔''Television News'' section, Chicago Tribune, October 6, 1968.〕 named after WLS radio (890 AM), which ABC had wholly owned since 1959 when the network bought the 50% interest it did not already hold in the station from Sears, Roebuck and Company. Ironically, ABC merged WLS radio with WENR, its shared-time partner, in 1954. WLS-TV had claimed to be "Chicago's first television station" in its sign-ons during the 1980s (implying a connection with the original WBKB on channel 4), but admitted to its true roots with WENR with its 30th anniversary in 1978.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.fuzzymemories.tv/?c=2929 )〕 On January 17, 1984, WLS-TV launched Tele1st, an ABC-owned overnight subscription television service that carried a mix of films and lifestyle programs for four hours per night six days a week after the station's sign-off at 2:00 a.m.; the service was similar in format to competitor ONTV (which was carried locally on WSNS-TV, channel 44) and other over-the-air pay services that existed during the early and mid-1980s. Tele1st was created with the concept of allowing users to record programming for later viewing; therefore, its decoder boxes were designed to unencrypt the signal only with the aid of a VCR. Scrambling codes that were sent to the box and relayed to the VCR were changed on a monthly basis, requiring subscribers to record additional footage airing immediately before and after that night's schedule to retrieve codes to play back the recorded programs properly; this resulted in any recordings being viewable only during that calendar month. Tele1st was deemed a failure, attributing only 4,000 subscribers at its peak, and ceased operations on June 30, 1984.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://chicagotelevision.com/pay2.htm )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「WLS-TV」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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