History
In 1973, Ann Arbor resident Gershom Morningstar, through his Wolverine-Morningstar Broadcasting Company, petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to allocate UHF channel 31 to the city.[1] The company then applied for[2] and received a construction permit to build a station on the newly assigned channel, which would be the first since WPAG-TV broadcast in the 1950s. Morningstar believed that the regional coverage of his proposed new station would make it a major outlet, estimating it would cover 80 percent of Michigan's population,[3] with more people than the Philadelphia television market—the nation's fourth largest.[4] In addition to Morningstar, 14 other residents of Washtenaw County and a local bank were involved.[5] The station received the call sign WRHT, but design changes delayed construction of a tower.
FCC delays frustrated Morningstar and delayed construction of channel 31. In February 1979, the commission gave Morningstar an order: sell the construction permit to a new firm within 45 days or lose it.[6] At the end of the period, Southern Satellite of Tulsa, Oklahoma, swooped in to buy the unbuilt WRHT. The company proposed to operate as a hybrid: regular ad-supported commercial programming during the day and subscription television (STV) to paying customers at night, the latter to be programmed by Wometco Home Theater.[7] By October, Southern Satellite had instead decided to program the STV service itself.[8]
Southern Satellite was approved to obtain the construction permit on November 28, 1979; it announced it would build the station's transmitter at the same site proposed by Wolverine-Morningstar, in Lyndon Township along M-52.[9] The FCC granted permission for the subscription service several months later,[10] and by October, construction was in progress. By that time, the name of the subscription service was announced as In-Home Theater, and Southern Satellite had changed its name to Satellite Syndicated Systems (SSS).[11] Kip Farmer, WRHT's first general manager, praised the preparatory work done by Morningstar for accelerating the process of starting the station.[12] WRHT signed on the air on January 12 or 13, 1981, held up by cold weather.[13] As the station signed on, SSS applied to change the call sign from WRHT to WIHT;[14]
At night, channel 31 offered its namesake service, In-Home Theater (IT). This movie service—which in turn contracted with SelecTV[19]—cost $22.95 a month, with an extra $3.95 monthly charge for late-night adult movies.[20] The FNN coverage lasted only a short time. The next month, the FCC abolished the so-called "28-hour rule"—which required stations to provide a minimum of, on average, four hours a day of non-subscription programming.[21] At that time, the service had 14,000 subscribers, well behind the 61,000 of its main competitor, ON TV on Detroit's WXON (channel 20).[22] SSS responded by devoting the vast majority of channel 31's airtime to IT;[23] previously, IT had aired for 14 hours a day. The move also served as an economy measure, as by 1983 the station had 35 full-time employees instead of 80 and could break even with fewer IT subscribers. The station had just one hour a week of local programming, part of the station's six-hour Sunday block of unscrambled programs.[24]
WIHT's main subscription TV competitor, ON TV, left Detroit on March 31, 1983, citing falling subscriber figures, competition from IT and other services, and restricted airtime on WXON.[25] At that time, subscribership to IT was still holding steady at 15,000.
On November 1, 1985, IT ceased broadcasting as cable penetration in the Ann Arbor area rose and subscriptions slowly declined, though the service still had 12,000 paying customers.[26] Once more, SSS programmed the station as an ad-supported independent largely reliant on the Satellite Program Network.[27] The station had little local programming, and viewership was initially low because Ann Arbor's cable system did not offer it.[28] This changed on May 1, 1986, when Toledo, Ohio, public TV station WGTE-TV was removed to make way for channel 31.[29] After a short experiment with locally produced home shopping programming, the station debuted a new local talk show, The Heart of the Matter, in early 1987.[30] During this time, WIHT was one of a handful of broadcast stations to air Electra, a teletext service that Tempo Enterprises (the renamed SSS) jointly owned with Taft Broadcasting.
Tempo Enterprises dropped most of WIHT's existing programming on September 21, 1987, to carry the Home Shopping Network (HSN), an effort to boost the station's middling revenue performance.[33] This led Ann Arbor's cable system, Columbia Cable, to remove WIHT from its lineup in favor of The Discovery Channel.[34][35]
In 1988, Tempo Enterprises was acquired by Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), a major cable system operator. TCI owned cable systems within WIHT's coverage area and could not retain the television station under FCC rules. Tempo divested channel 31 to FAB Communications—owned by Fred Blencowe, a member of the Tempo board of directors—which in turn sold WIHT to Blackstar Enterprises for $4.35 million. Blackstar was owned by John E. Oxendine, a Black entrepreneur from Washington, D.C. The company was no stranger to home shopping; HSN owned 45 percent of its equity,[36] and it ran stations with the format in Florida and Oregon.
