WNGM-TV The station went on air on April 18, 1989, as WNGM-TV, with the
call sign standing for "
North Georgia Mountains". Initially the station ran a general entertainment format with
cartoons, classic and recent
sitcoms, blocks of
country music programming, old movies and
syndicated first-run shows; it also aired a local newscast and magazine program focusing on north Georgia. WNGM-TV was owned by a company including the final two applicants for the channel: Georgia Mountain Corporation and Sunbelt Television, Inc., which merged their bids in 1985 and won the construction permit. Its transmitter was located away from Atlanta, reaching Athens with a grade A signal while sending a very weak signal into eastern
metro Atlanta. As a result, many syndicators sold the rights for shows that were already on the Atlanta stations to WNGM. The station provided an alternative to viewers in areas which had moderate
VHF reception and poor
UHF reception from Atlanta;
Clarke County had a cable penetration rate of 83 percent, 30 points above the national average. NGM Television Partners, the licensee, sold the station for $10 million in 1996 to Whitehead Media, which the next year formalized a time brokerage agreement under which
Paxson Communications Corporation began operating channel 34. However, Paxson opted the next year to divest itself of extra stations in markets where it controlled more than one, such as Atlanta, where it owned
WPXA-TV. The $73.5 million sale by Paxson of the operating rights and by Whitehead of the licenses for WNGM-TV and
WOAC in
Canton, Ohio, to Global Broadcasting Systems, Inc., was terminated a month later when the buyer failed to post an escrow deposit. From 1996 until September 1, 1997, WNGM-TV aired Paxson's Infomall TV
infomercial network, then switching to separate but similar home shopping programming, which was an issue at play in a cable carriage dispute with
MediaOne over whether it had to be placed on a series of major Atlanta-area cable systems.
"Hotlanta 34" In 1998,
USA Broadcasting acquired WNGM for $50 million. It was part of a larger deal between Paxson and USA that allowed Paxson-owned stations in
New Orleans and
Memphis to make early exits from affiliation contracts with the
Home Shopping Network, gave Paxson a station serving
Portland, Oregon, and put USA Broadcasting in every top 10 market but
Detroit. After the USA acquisition, the home shopping programming was dropped and replaced with music videos from
The Box—which led the FCC to greenlight the station's push for must-carry in the Atlanta area that August. In November 1999, WNGM was the third of four USAB stations after
Miami's
WAMI-TV to convert to USAB's new "CityVision" general entertainment format and became "Hotlanta 34" under new WHOT-TV call letters. The centerpiece of the plan was a three-year contract for the rights to telecast
Atlanta Hawks basketball. The move was made after
WATL (channel 36) opted not to renew its deal because of the expanding program offerings of
The WB. However, after the format failed to take off where it was introduced and the company registered operating losses of $62 million in 2000, Diller opted to sell the stations to Univision in 2001.
Univision Georgia While some of the stations were used to start
Telefutura, a second network, the purchase gave Univision its first ever broadcast outlet in Atlanta, where the Latino population had grown by 362 percent during the 1990s. Under new WUVG call letters, channel 34 changed to Spanish-language programming on January 14, 2002. While local news was not immediately added, WUVG began producing a public affairs program in Spanish, (
Our Georgia), the first such program on Atlanta television since 1997. ==News operation==