In November 1981, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) designated 13 competing applications for UHF channel 30 in Nashville for comparative hearing.
[5] What was once a mid-April launch target moved up to February as TVX signed for studio space at Third Avenue South and Peabody Street.
[7] It immediately entered into a money-losing competition with WFYZ; however, TVX outlasted the Murfreesboro station, with its limited financial resources.
[10] In January 1986, TVX—already having relegated WHTN to the status, per company chairman J. Timothy McDonald, of showing "freebies no one else wants"—refocused its attack on WZTV, Nashville's leading independent.
[11] The station became affiliated that fall with the new Fox network,[12] but TVX continued to need to devote additional attention to improving channel 30's ratings against WZTV, hiring new management and increasing its promotional efforts.
[15] The company was to pay Salomon Brothers $200 million on January 1, 1988, and missed the first payment deadline, having been unable to lure investors to its junk bonds even before Black Monday.
[17] In the wake of the SouthWest MultiMedia sale effort stalling, TVX found another buyer for WCAY-TV: MT Communications, the company of Michael Thompson.
[19] MT Communications assumed the challenge TVX had faced in its entire history running channel 30: passing WZTV in the ratings.
[20] The next year, it agreed to acquire WUTV in Buffalo, New York, along with the programming inventory of competitor WNYB-TV, which then was sold to a Christian broadcaster; the deal was not completed until June 1990 owing to ownership complications in the market.
On February 6, 1990, after negotiations that had been in progress for a week, Act III acquired the Fox affiliation and the vast majority of WXMT's programming inventory from MT Communications.
From 1992 to 1994, it aired The Scene at 9, a prime time newscast produced by Nashville NBC affiliate WSMV-TV and the first such broadcast in the market.
The station made an early commitment to the United Paramount Network (UPN), signing on to become an affiliate in November 1993—more than a year before it began programming in 1995.
[38] WUXP-TV began airing a Thursday Night Lights package of local high school football games in 2008.
[41] In 2013, WUXP-TV began airing the state championship football games of the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association (TSSAA) as part of a statewide network.