is the
Washington, D.C. area's
UPN affiliate station, broadcasting on channel 20 (digital channel 35), with transmitter located in
Bethesda, Maryland . WDCA is the sister station to
Fox owned-and-operated
WTTG (channel 5) and one-half of a
Duopoly owned by
Fox Television Stations Group , a subsidiary of the
News Corporation .
On
February 22 ,
2006 , Fox announced that WDCA will be part of a new primetime network called
My Network TV , which is scheduled to launch on September 5, 2006. My Network TV will be operated by Fox Television Stations and its syndication division, Twentieth Television.
WDCA signed on as an
Independent Station on
April 20 ,
1966 , owned by the Capitol Broadcasting Corporation. It was Washington's second independent station, nearly 20 years younger than its future sister station WTTG.
Milton Grant , who previously worked at WTTG, was President of Capitol Broadcasting, and thus was WDCA's founding general manager. Grant would sell channel 20
Three Years Later to the Superior Tube Company. During this early period, WTTG had stronger programming, but WDCA had a decent lineup of its own. However, the station was not all that profitable.
In
1979 Superior Tube sold WDCA to the
Cincinnati, Ohio -based
Taft Broadcasting . In the
1970s and
1980s , WDCA's best-known personality was
Dick Dyszel , who played monster movie host "Count Gore DeVol", kids show host "
Captain 20 ", and also served as the station's announcer.
Under Taft's stewardship, channel 20 became very profitable. As Taft upgraded the programming, WDCA gained higher ratings, but still trailed WTTG overall. Channel 20 also became a regional superstation, appearing on
Cable Television systems throughout
Maryland and
Virginia and as far south as
Charlotte, North Carolina . In
February 1987 Taft sold WDCA, and its other independent and Fox stations, to the
Norfolk, Virginia -based TVX Broadcast Group. The Taft purchase created a debt load for TVX, and the sale of their smaller-market stations did not fully reduce the debt. In mid-
1989 , TVX sold a minority interest in its company to
Paramount Pictures . Two years later, in
1991 , Paramount bought TVX's remaining shares and became full owner of the stations, which were renamed the .
Viacom purchased the group as part of its acquisition of Paramount Pictures in
1993 .
On
January 16 ,
1995 , WDCA became a charter affiliate of the United Paramount Network, which was originally co-owned by Viacom and
Chris-Craft Industries . On
October 29 ,
2001 , Viacom traded WDCA to Fox Television Stations (along with
KTXH in
Houston ) in return for
KBHK-TV in
San Francisco . This station tradeoff also created the first television duopoly in the Washington market. Fox integrated the operations of both WDCA and WTTG into one, with WDCA moving into WTTG's Wisconsin Avenue facility.
Today, channel 20 is the broadcast outlet for the
Washington Nationals baseball team. It runs cartoons, off network sitcoms, reality and talk shows and sports in addition to UPN programming.
On
January 24 ,
2006 , the UPN and
WB networks announced they would merge into a new network called , the letters representing the first initial of its corporate parents CBS (the parent company of UPN) and the
Warner Bros . unit of
Time Warner . The merger will take effect in September 2006, and current WB station
WBDC was announced as the CW's Washington affiliate. Fox-owned UPN stations, like WDCA, were not included in the CW's affiliate lineup.
The following day, on
January 25 , 2006, Fox announced that they were removing all UPN-related references from the UPN stations that they own, outside of network programming. As a result, WDCA changed its on-air identity from ''UPN 20'' to ''DCA 20''. The other Fox-owned UPN affiliates made similar modifications to their branding.
