Maryland Public Television (MPT) is the PBS member state network for the U.S. state of Maryland. It operates under the auspices of the Maryland Public Broadcasting Commission, an agency of the Maryland state government that holds the licenses for all PBS member stations licensed in the state. Studios are located in the unincorporated community of Owings Mills in northwestern Baltimore County. MPT operates six full-power transmitters that cover nearly all of the state, plus Washington, D.C., and parts of Virginia, West Virginia, Delaware, and Pennsylvania.

History

WMPB (licensed to Baltimore) first signed on in 1969 as the first station of the Maryland Center for Public Broadcasting; it gained satellite stations in Salisbury, Hagerstown, and Annapolis between 1971 and 1975, resulting in a formation of a statewide public television network. The network adopted its current name in 1984. Maryland Instructional Television (Maryland ITV), a division of the State Department of Education, was also housed at the network until 1991. On July 4, 1987, WFPT (licensed to Frederick) signed on to fill coverage gaps in the outer Washington market, while WGPT in Oakland began operations to cover the extreme west of the state, much of which previously had no local television service at all. About 1999, the network launched an afternoon Britcom programming block, Afternoon Tea, replacing children's programming. By 2009, MPT was airing kids' programming during the day on its MPT Select channel. In September 2015, as part of budget cuts, MPT outsourced its master control operations to Public Media Management—a joint venture of Boston PBS member WGBH and Sony Corporation.

Productions

Current regional productions

Nationally distributed productions

Regional documentaries and specials

Past productions

Stations

The MPT stations are: WGPT is assigned to the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania market and elects must-carry status on satellite providers there. For the purposes of pay-television carriage, WMPT and WMPB are assigned to the Baltimore market, while WFPT and WWPB are assigned to Washington–Hagerstown and WCPB to Salisbury.

Technical information

The stations' signals are multiplexed: {{legend|#DFEBF6|Broadcast on behalf of another station}}

Analog-to-digital conversion

MPT's stations ended regular programming on their analog signals on June 12, 2009, the official date on which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The stations' digital channel allocations post-transition are as follows:

Spectrum reallocation

As a part of the repacking process following the 2016–2017 FCC incentive auction, channels 38 through 51 were removed from television broadcasting. None of MPT's stations sold their allocations, but five of them moved channels within the UHF band: WMPT moved to channel 21, WMPB to channel 22, WWPB to channel 29, WGPT to channel 26, and WCPT to channel 16.

ATSC 3.0

MPT joined the Baltimore market's ATSC 3.0 lighthouse station, hosted at WNUV, on June 24, 2021. In return, WMPT and WMPB hosts WNUV's main channel (54.1) to preserve coverage for existing ATSC 1.0 TV sets.