WXIA-TV
The two stations share studios at One Monroe Place on the north end of midtown Atlanta; WXIA-TV's transmitter is located in the city's east section, near Kirkwood.Rivers,[5] in part because planned allocation changes meant that there would be no further commercial VHF stations for Atlanta, and they sought to operate the channel as well.[9] Thus, the present-day channel 11 is the second-oldest broadcasting facility in the South; WSB-TV signed on in 1948, four months after WTVR-TV in Richmond, Virginia.The station was sold to Pacific & Southern Broadcasting in 1968 and on March 23 became known as WQXI-TV, aligning it with WQXI AM and FM (the calls had originally been used on channel 36, currently WATL, from 1954 to 1955).[citation needed] On June 5, 2006, Gannett entered into an agreement to purchase WATL from the Tribune Company for $180 million, creating Atlanta's first television duopoly;[12] the sale was finalized on August 7, 2006.[17] The station previously aired a program called Noonday for many years, beginning with the news at noon and at 12:30 continuing on for the rest of the hour with features, akin somewhat to the Today Show.WXIA also aired a Braves game in 2023 as part of a simulcast between NBC and Peacock's MLB Sunday Leadoff package.As part of the conversion to HD, a new HD-ready news set from Production Design Group, Ltd. was built and the station began using a new graphics package from Giant Octopus.On April 28, 2010, a new 4:30 a.m. newscast called Wake Up with Chesley debuted, featuring meteorologist Chesley McNeil and travel producer Matt Holmes; in addition to news updates throughout the show, McNeil primarily gives weather updates while Holmes gives travel delays and information.[19] Between July 31 and August 28, 2017, WXIA underwent a significant relaunch of its news department, mirroring a similar move that was made by Tampa Bay sister station WTSP in April of that same year.[citation needed] In June 2021, WXIA re-titled its morning and late-night newscasts once again; the former is now titled 11 Alive Morning News and the latter, which had been renamed from The Late Feed to Up Late following Vinnie Politan's departure from the station in November 2018, returned to the previous 11 Alive News at 11 title.In 2011, Atlanta-based Bounce TV launched on September 26 with WATL 36.2 as its de facto flagship affiliate, with the WIZ channel being restored two weeks later on 36.3.In early October, 11.2 again became Universal Sports and 11.3 was deleted and was reversed again a week later, with WIZ bounced back to its original channel 11.2.However, it used severe video data compression, which left very obvious blurriness and pixelation during high-motion scenes common in sports.This low-bitrate sacrifice protects the quality of the main HD channel and is unavoidable because Universal Sports transmits its programming via satellite in this highly compressed form (4.48 Mbit/s).