WAWW-LD (channel 30) is a low-power television station licensed to serve Rochester, New York, United States. The station is owned by Squirrel Broadcasting Company, a joint venture of James Smisloff and New York radio and TV station owner Craig Fox. Its main subchannel broadcasts HSN.
History
Hometown Vision, Inc., received a construction permit on July 31, 1989, to build a new low-power TV station on channel 38 in Rochester with call sign W38AW. Construction began by year's end on the new station's studios on Monroe Avenue.[3] Test broadcasts began April 20, 1990, with All News Channel as a primary program source and the station filling the last 30 minutes of each hour with local and national syndicated shows.[4] The station's fare also included dubbed South American soap operas, 1920s movies, and professional wrestling.[5] Programming from HSN began to appear on W38AW in 1994.[6]
In 1995, Hometown Vision sold W38AW for $125,000 to Kaleidoscope Affiliates of Little Rock, Arkansas.[7] Kaleidoscope owned a service known as "America's Disability Channel", which channel 38 began to air as Kaleidoscope's 16th such station; the service included programs with audio description for the visually impaired and closed captioning for the hearing impaired.[8] The call letters were changed to WAWW-LP in December 1995, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) permitted the use of conventional four-letter call signs by low-power television stations. Kaleidoscope Affiliates changed its name in 1998 to Equity Broadcasting Corporation. Equity then sold WAWW-LP to Venture Technologies Group in January 2002.[9]
After moving to channel 20 in 2005 due to displacement by the digital facility of WKBW-TV in Buffalo, Squirrel acquired WAWW-LP from Venture for $10,000.[10] It continued to broadcast in analog until the final shut-off date for low-power stations in the United States, July 13, 2021,[11] and resumed broadcasting in digital for the first time by the start of December.[12]
^DeChick, Joe (August 31, 1995). "Channel 38's vanishing act may end soon". Democrat and Chronicle. Rochester, New York. p. 1C. Archived from the original on March 7, 2022. Retrieved March 7, 2022 – via Newspapers.com.
