WPCH-TV

WPCH-TV

ATSC 3.0 station
Atlanta, Georgia United States
Channels	Digital: 31 (UHF) Virtual: 17
Branding	Peachtree TV Atlanta's CW
Programming
Affiliations	17.1, 17.4: The CW for others, see § Subchannels
Ownership
Owner	Gray Television (Gray Television Licensee, LLC)
Sister stations	WANF, WKTB-CD
History
First air date	September 1, 1967 (56 years ago) (1967-09-01)
Former call signs	WJRJ-TV (1967–1970) WTCG (1970–1979) WTBS (1979–2007)
Former channel number(s)	Analog: 17 (UHF, 1967–2009) Digital: 20 (UHF, 2002–2019)
Former affiliations	Independent (1967–2023)
Call sign meaning	"Peachtree", a common place/road naming theme
Technical information[1]
Licensing authority	FCC
Facility ID	64033
ERP	805 kW
HAAT	329 m (1,079 ft)
Transmitter coordinates	33°48′26.4″N 84°20′21.5″W / 33.807333°N 84.339306°W / 33.807333; -84.339306
Links
Public license information	Public file LMS
Website	Peachtree TV

WPCH-TV (channel 17), branded on-air as Peachtree TV, is a television station in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, affiliated with The CW. It is owned by locally based Gray Television alongside CBS affiliate and company flagship WANF (channel 46), and low-power, Class A Telemundo affiliate WKTB-CD (channel 47). WPCH-TV and WANF share studios on 14th Street Northwest in Atlanta's Home Park neighborhood; WPCH-TV's transmitter is located in the Woodland Hills section of northeastern Atlanta.

During its ownership under the Turner Broadcasting System (which owned the station from April 1970 until February 2017), WPCH-TV—then using the WTCG call letters—pioneered the distribution of broadcast television stations retransmitted by communications satellite to cable and satellite subscribers throughout the United States, expanding the small independent station into the first national "superstation" on December 17, 1976. (The station eventually became among the first four American superstations to begin being distributed to television providers in Canada in 1985.)

The former superstation feed—which eventually became known as simply TBS, and had maintained a nearly identical program schedule as the local Atlanta feed—was converted by Turner into a conventional basic cable network on October 1, 2007, at which time it was concurrently added to cable providers within the Atlanta market (including Comcast and Charter) alongside its existing local carriage on satellite providers DirecTV and Dish Network. Channel 17—which had used the WTBS callsign since 1979—was concurrently relaunched as WPCH and reformatted as a traditional independent station with a separate schedule exclusively catering to the Atlanta market. Although the Atlanta station is no longer carried on American multichannel television providers outside of its home market, WPCH-TV continues to be available as a de facto superstation on most Canadian cable and satellite providers.