It is owned and operated by the Ion Media subsidiary of the E. W. Scripps Company and maintains offices on Main Street in Manayunk, with a transmitter in Roxborough, both sections of Philadelphia.
It intended to operate as a general-market independent station but found itself with too little cash, as a result of nonexistent carriage on local cable systems, and was forced to switch to home shopping programming to generate revenue.
The group remained low-profile until July 1985, when it announced an October start date and some details of its proposed programming as a commercial independent.
By September, the proposed call sign had changed to WBOT-TV (the "Best of Television") to avoid confusion with WPVI-TV in Philadelphia, and construction was under way on the downtown Wilmington studios and the transmitter site in South Harrison Township, New Jersey.
WBOC-TV alleged confusion would result from the launch of WBOT-TV and that it had received telephone calls intended to reach the Wilmington outlet.
[23] Later that year, the station got something of a break when revisions to must-carry laws and a rebuild of the Wilmington cable system, sold to Heritage Cablevision, forced the company to add WTGI-TV to its lineup.
On February 29, it affiliated with Telemundo and began to recast itself as a multilingual station serving the Delaware Valley's ethnic communities, branding as "Philadelphia's International Channel".
[30] The deal drew criticism from WTGI's employees, believing the loss of the station's existing programming would have a negative impact on the region.
[31] However, before the commission could act, NMTV withdrew its bid because the delays had made it impossible to meet deadlines imposed by the bankruptcy court.
[32][33] The passage of the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992 put must-carry rules back into place, with important impacts on WTGI.
In late 1992, of the 1.8 million cable homes in the Philadelphia market, only 520,000 received the station, and attempts to increase that number were being met by "various degrees of coldness".
[36] Despite increased profitability, Delaware Valley Broadcasters filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection a second time in August 1993, per general manager Dan Slape, "to better meet our future goals and objectives".
[42] The network affiliated with WTVE in Reading, only to be ousted in 2000 and sign its present outlet, WWSI (then based in Atlantic City), in March 2001.