WDEF-TV (channel 12) is a television station in Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States, affiliated with CBS. Owned by Morris Multimedia, the station maintains studios on Broad Street in Chattanooga. Its transmitter is on Hampton Road in nearby Signal Mountain, along Walden Ridge. The signal covers sections of Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama. Although parts of the Chattanooga market are in the Central Time Zone, all schedules on WDEF-TV are listed in Eastern Time.

History

The station signed on the air on April 25, 1954, carrying programming from all four networks, though it has always been a primary CBS affiliate. It took the CBS affiliation from WROM-TV (channel 9, now WTVC). It lost NBC to WRGP-TV (now WRCB-TV) in 1956, and lost ABC to WTVC (the former WROM) in 1958. During the late 1950s, the station was also briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network. Roy H. Park bought WDEF-TV in 1963 as well as WDEF 1370 AM (now WXCT) and WDEF-FM 92.3. His media interests eventually became known as Park Communications, which was bought by Media General in 1997. In 2006, Media General sold the station to Morris Multimedia.

Programming

In its early years, WDEF was locally-oriented, offering a mix of children's shows, talk and variety programs, including Point of View, one of the longest–running local public affairs programs in the United States. WDEF has been the local home of the Nashville-based Tennessee Titans football team since 1998 (when the team was still called the Oilers). This comes with its CBS affiliation, as CBS carries all National Football League games played in the afternoon that feature a road team from the American Football Conference, in which the Titans play.

Technical information

Subchannels

The station's signal is multiplexed:

Analog-to-digital conversion

WDEF-TV shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 12, on February 17, 2009, the original target date on which full-power television stations in the United States were to transition from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate (which was later pushed back to June 12, 2009). The station's digital signal relocated from its pre-transition UHF channel 47 to VHF channel 12 for post-transition operations. Immediately before the shutdown, anchor Joe Legge gave a brief retrospective of the station's history as well as the farewell message for all analog viewers. The message ended with images of the past newscasts.