Early years In 1962, the Florida Educational Television Commission wrote to the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to recommend a second non-commercial reserved channel be allocated to Tampa. It suggested that channel 22 be relocated from
Lakeland for use in Tampa, where the
University of South Florida (USF) already had money set aside to start an educational TV station. The FCC moved channel 22 to Tampa the next year, but it did not reserve the channel, leaving it open for a potential commercial TV station. That action frustrated the university and others in educational television. An editorial in the
St. Petersburg Times shared this frustration and called on the commission to reconsider, and at least one applicant, Tampa Bay Television, expressed interest in activating channel 22 as a commercial station. Representatives of the state commission conferred with FCC chairman
E. William Henry in January 1964 to plead their case. Meanwhile, in February 1964, USF completed its television studio for the purpose of distributing material on the college's in-house closed-circuit system; the university joined with Tampa's existing noncommercial station,
WEDU (channel 3), to propose a joint tower to house the two TV stations. The FCC's assignment of channel 16 as a second reserved channel to Tampa solved the channel 22 problem and allowed USF to refile its application for the station. The university joined with the state commission and the
Florida Board of Control in September 1964 to apply for grant funding. On February 23, 1965, the money and the
construction permit were each granted, allowing the university to begin building channel 16. Tower erection began in September and was finished by May 1966. WUSF-TV began broadcasting on September 11, 1966. It broadcast for five hours a day on weekdays only, with a mix of reruns of older commercial shows, USF courses, two children's programs, and several local programs. Initially, WUSF-TV had no network programming, as WEDU was the local station for
National Educational Television. Instead, it focused on providing local shows and college-level
telecourses; during the day, the station was off the air while the studios were in use to produce closed-circuit programs. Another early local presentation was a Spanish-language news and public affairs program (In Focus)—the only such program in Florida outside of Miami.
Expanded programming While WUSF-TV aimed to complement WEDU, the arrival of
PBS in 1970 as NET's replacement triggered acrimony between the two stations. Channel 16 sought parity and the ability to simulcast PBS programs, and it indicated a desire to begin fundraising in the community, which irked WEDU officials fearing a dilution of viewer support and audience. A lobbying battle came to a fever pitch in January 1971, when leaders from the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and the
Florida Department of Education and several influential state legislators forced leaders of WEDU and WUSF-TV into a motel room to work out their differences. The consensus that emerged allowed WUSF-TV to become a PBS station, but the stations agreed not to simulcast programs. It encouraged channel 16 to develop an alternative lineup to WEDU's programs for schools and children and made it the primary source of local evening programming. WUSF-TV also began its conversion to color programming in 1971. The next year, the station started Your Open University, a series of broadcast courses for credit. In 1974, it completed the conversion to local color with the purchase of four new cameras, began broadcasting seven days a week, and extended its broadcast day to start at 2:30 p.m., aided by a change in funding procedures from the CPB. The schedule was further lengthened in 1976 when WUSF-TV moved its sign-on to 10 a.m., hoping to bring PBS programs to women and elderly audiences that previously could not see them. A satellite dish was built on the USF campus in 1977, allowing WUSF and WEDU to make use of satellite delivery to broaden their mix of PBS programming. The University of South Florida expanded its involvement in public TV broadcasting in 1983, when it completed construction of WSFP-TV (channel 30) in
Fort Myers. The station started as a repeater of WUSF-TV and began producing programs for Southwest Florida in 1988. On July 1, 1996, as part of the transition of USF's Fort Myers operations into
Florida Gulf Coast University, the new university became the licensee of the station, which changed its call sign to
WGCU.
New studios and funding cuts Since its sign-on, WUSF-TV had broadcast from the basement of the USF library, occupying space once utilized by the book bindery. Beginning in the early 1980s, the university pursued funding to build a new studio facility. The basement site became inadequate as the station grew, and the forthcoming conversion to digital television spurred the state government and USF to take action. In 1998, the state Department of Education allocated $6 million for construction of a new, facility next to the
WUSF radio studios, and the state supplied another $2 million to pay for digital equipment. The new studios opened in 2001, providing more on-campus visibility. In 2002, WUSF radio and television came under a single general manager, JoAnn Urofsky. Under Urofsky, the station launched its digital signal on July 1, 2004; its three new
subchannels featured educational content from the
Annenberg/CPB Channel, PBS You, and the Florida Knowledge Network. The digital signal on channel 34 became the only signal on April 16, 2009, when the analog signal was turned off two months before the final digital transition date. In the late 2000s, the relationship between WEDU and WUSF, which had remained cordial for decades, deteriorated again. One notable incident involved WUSF selling videos of
The Lawrence Welk Show during a pledge drive, hours before
Welk aired regularly on WEDU. WUSF-TV management took umbrage at PBS designating channel 16 a secondary station, saying their increased reliance on local programming led to the unfavorable label from PBS.
Bright House Networks, the primary cable provider in the Tampa Bay area, exacerbated the strife by exercising a contract in its clause with PBS stations and demoting WUSF-TV, but not WEDU, to a tier where not all subscribers could see it. The relationship was repaired again a year later, when managers of both stations agreed to collaborate on programming as well as a jointly produced fundraising night. A statewide defunding of public media in 2011, a consequence of governor
Rick Scott's decision to veto a funding package, left the station unable to produce local programming that was not paid for by a grant. ==WEDQ==