It is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, which also operates Dabl affiliate WWMB (channel 21, also licensed to Florence) under a shared services agreement (SSA) with owner Howard Stirk Holdings.
The two stations share studios on University Boulevard in Conway; WPDE-TV's transmitter is located on Pee Dee Church Road in Floydale, South Carolina.
On June 24, 1978, Eastern Carolinas Broadcasting, a group of primarily local investors, applied to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to build a new television station on channel 15 in Florence.
[2] At the time, the area served by the station was still very rural, allowing Eastern Carolina Broadcasters to apply for a loan from the Farmers Home Administration.
[8] In 2001, the station announced that it would move its Myrtle Beach employees and newscast production to a new facility in Conway which had previously housed bank offices.
In 1993, it sought to sell the station as part of a liquidation of some assets;[10] general manager Bill Christian reached an agreement to purchase it, but the deal fell through in 1994 after he could not put together financing.
Like the other two stations in the market, WPDE's news operation is split in two, with the majority of staff members working out of the Conway studios and a small bureau based on South Floyd Drive in Florence to cover the inland portion of the region.
This is in part because that station essentially had the area to itself for over a quarter-century with the only real competition being Grade B signals from WECT in Wilmington and Columbia's WIS (both affiliates of NBC).
It was the first station in the market to move the majority of its operations to Horry County in 2002, a few years after setting up a weather studio in the Myrtle Beach Pavilion.
To coincide with the re-branding, WPDE became the last major network station in the Florence–Myrtle Beach market to broadcast its local news in HD.
WPDE remained in wall-to-wall coverage for 50 total hours during and after the storm and was broadcast to eastern North Carolina homes for days.
[19] Called Trabajando Por Ti (the Spanish translation of the station's slogan), it was anchored by Simon Williams with occasional contributions by other Spanish-speaking staff members.
After the latter personality departed WPDE and Gilbert died in 1997, the show was renamed UPN 21 News at 10 and anchored by Leo Stallworth (later Audra Grant) until its cancellation in 2000.
WWMB began having competition to its broadcast in 2004 when Fox affiliate WFXB (channel 43) entered into a news share agreement with WBTW.
On August 19, 2013, WPDE revived a weeknight prime time newscast on WWMB called The CW21 News At 10, which lasted a few years before ending.