WSCV (channel 51) is a television station licensed to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, United States, serving as the Telemundo outlet for the Miami area.
The two stations share studios on Southwest 27th Street in Miramar; WSCV's transmitter is located in Pembroke Park, Florida.
From 1980 to 1984, the station primarily broadcast the ON TV subscription service until its owner, Oak Communications, sold it to John Blair & Co., which relaunched it the next year as Spanish-language WSCV.
[4] Delayed from a planned October 1 start due to bad weather,[5] WSMS was the first station in Fort Lauderdale in 12 years, operating from its studios on Federal Highway.
A subsidiary of Recreation Corporation of America (RCA), owner of the Pirates World amusement park in Dania, filed to acquire channel 51; Singer became an officer in the new company.
[7] Though one objection was made to RCA's plans, by Hank Zinkil—a state representative and former mayor of Hollywood attempting to exaggerate that Pirates World had been "the source of great controversy" due to rock concerts which required consistent crowd control, and a drug dealing site[13]—the FCC dismissed Zinkil's challenge.
On the night of February 24, two bombs went off at the studios in Dania and a production office the station leased in Miami;[18][19] a Cuban exile group took credit, blaming WKID's policy of rapprochement with communist Cuba in its Spanish-language programming.
[23] In the 1970s, WKID was the second-largest source of Spanish-language television programming in South Florida, providing the only prime time shows not being aired on WLTV.
[25] During this era, cable providers that carried competing independent WCIX outside of the Miami market, especially in the Tampa and Orlando areas, carried WKID during the overnight hours, after WCIX signed off for the night;[26] channel 51 served up The All Night Show, a campy mix of movies hosted by Dave Dixon, to this audience.
[30] With the expansion of cable television in the Miami area, ON TV proved to be an ill-fated venture; by July 1984, when it laid off half its staff, subscriptions had fallen from a 1982 high of 44,700[31] to 28,500,[32] making it the smallest of Oak's STV operations at the time.
[45] Another feature in the station's early months were Major League Baseball telecasts; announcers in the channel 51 studio produced Spanish-language commentary for games of the Baltimore Orioles and other teams.
[46] In 1986, the Reliance Group acquired WSCV and WKAQ-TV in San Juan, Puerto Rico, from John Blair & Co., which was paid $300 million to thwart a hostile takeover.
The station initially aired a 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. local newscast, anchored by Cuban-born Lucy Pereda and news director Eduardo Arango.
[61] Pereda left before the end of 1985 to work for the Spanish International Network (going on to host Mundo Latino, its first national morning show),[62][63] while Arango was ousted in early 1986 over differences in philosophy with Rumbaut.
"[66] In late 1986, WSCV hired María Montoya, a former actress who had arrived in Miami as part of the Mariel boatlift of 1980,[67] and Ambrosio Hernández, who had worked at several radio stations in Chicago, to complement the team.
[75] The move, which helped to lift WSCV's ratings slightly, escalated Miami's Spanish-language news war: Hernández defected to a rebuilding WLTV.
[77] Kasanzew was demoted to a reporter two years later as part of a major shakeup in which three newscasters were fired and news production was suspended for a week as the station readied a "clean slate",[78] with Callava the only remaining anchor.
[79] Montoya returned to WSCV in 1999 when the station began to expand its local news with the first Spanish-language midday newscast in the country.
[89] The station's signal is multiplexed and includes three of the four subchannels offered by WTVJ, which converted to ATSC 3.0 (NextGen TV) broadcast in January 2023.