Philadelphia
Television

In the 1930s, the experimental station W3XE, owned by Philco, became the first television station in Philadelphia. The station became NBC 's first affiliate in 1939, and later became KYW-TV (currently a CBS affiliate). WCAU-TV, WFIL-TV, and WHYY-TV were all founded by the 1960s. In 1952, WFIL (renamed WPVI) premiered the television show Bandstand, which later became the nationally broadcast American Bandstand hosted by Dick Clark.

Each commercial network has an affiliate in Philadelphia: KYW-TV 3 (CBS), WPVI-TV 6 (ABC), WCAU 10 (NBC), WPHL-TV 17 (The CW with MyNetworkTV on DT2), WFPA-CD 28 (UniMás), WTXF-TV 29 (Fox), WPSG 57 (Independent), WWSI 62 (Telemundo), and WUVP-DT 65 (Univision). The region is served also by public broadcasting stations WPPT-TV (Philadelphia), WHYY-TV (Wilmington, Delaware and Philadelphia), WLVT-TV (Lehigh Valley), and NJTV (New Jersey).

Philadelphia has owned-and-operated stations for five major English-language broadcast networks: NBC – WCAU-TV, CBS – KYW-TV, ABC – WPVI-TV, Fox – WTXF-TV and The CW – WPHL-TV. Since September 2024, it is the largest television market where at least one of the six English networks are shown at a station not owned by a particular network's associated parent company. The major Spanish-language networks are Univision – WUVP-DT, UniMás – WFPA-CD, and Telemundo – WWSI-TV.

As of 2018, the city is the nation's fourth-largest consumer in media market, as ranked by the Nielsen Media Research firm, with nearly 2.9 million TV households.
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