WTHR (channel 13) is a television station in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States, affiliated with NBC. It is owned by the Tegna subsidiary of Nexstar Media Group alongside Class A MeTV affiliate WALV-CD (channel 46); Nexstar also owns CBS affiliates WTTV/WTTK (channels 4 and 29) and Fox affiliate WXIN (channel 59). WTHR and WALV-CD share studios on North Meridian Street (south of I-65) in downtown Indianapolis; WTHR's transmitter is located near Ditch Road and West 96th Street in Carmel.
History WLWI The station first signed on the air on October 30, 1957, as WLWI. Founded by the Crosley Broadcasting Corporation, it originally operated as an ABC affiliate,"Crosley WLW-I (TV) signed as basic ABC-TV affiliate." Broadcasting, April 1, 1957, pg. 126. taking the affiliation from Bloomington-licensed WTTV (channel 4, now a CBS affiliate), which had affiliated with the network one year earlier. WLWI was an ABC affiliate for the next 22 years. It also made an arrangement with National Educational Television to carry the first season of Sesame Street until WFYI (channel 20), the PBS member station in Indianapolis, signed on in 1970.
WLWI was one of four Crosley stations that made up the WLW Television Network. The other stations, all in Ohio, were the regional network's flagship WLWT in Cincinnati, WLWC (now WCMH-TV) in Columbus, and WLWD (now WDTN) in Dayton. Crosley also owned WLW radio in Cincinnati, WLWA (now WXIA-TV) in Atlanta, and WOAI-TV in San Antonio. Channel 13 and its sister stations in Ohio, interconnected via microwave link, shared common programming such as The Ruth Lyons 50-50 Club, The Bob Braun Show, The Paul Dixon Show, Midwestern Hayride, The Phil Donahue Show, and Cincinnati Reds baseball game telecasts, and had similar on-air branding which reflected their connection to each other. Channel 13 called itself "WLW-I" to highlight its association with WLW radio, a 50,000-watt clear channel station whose daytime signal reached portions of the Indianapolis area.
From 1957 to 1962, the station was tied up in one of the most heated licensing disputes in early television history. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) originally awarded the construction permit to build a television station on channel 13 to a group headed by Union Federal Savings and Loan president George Sadlier. However, after an appeal, the FCC reversed its decision and awarded the permit to Crosley. One of the other competitors, WIBC owner Richard Fairbanks, then sued to force new license hearings. Fairbanks contended that the FCC had erred in awarding the last VHF channel allocation in Indianapolis to a company based in Ohio when there were viable applicants based in Indiana. The suit, however, was filed too late to prevent WLWI from signing on under Crosley ownership.
The District of Columbia Court of Appeals overturned the FCC's decision in 1958, but allowed Crosley to continue running the station pending further action by the FCC. In 1961, the FCC awarded Fairbanks the channel 13 license, but Crosley appealed. The following year, Crosley and Fairbanks reached a deal in which Crosley traded WLWA to Fairbanks in return for being allowed to keep WLWI; both stations became sister stations in 2019 when the now-WXIA-TV owner Tegna acquired channel 13.
Amid this instability in ownership, WLWI found the going rather difficult. It was also dogged by a weaker network affiliation; ABC would not be on an equal footing with CBS and NBC in the ratings until the 1970s. WLWI spent most of its first 17 years of operation languishing as a third place also-ran behind NBC affiliate WFBM-TV (channel 6, now ABC affiliate WRTV) and then-CBS affiliate WISH-TV (channel 8, now a CW affiliate). In some cases, it even fell to fourth place in the local ratings behind then-independent station WTTV (despite WTTV being licensed to Bloomington and having incomplete signal coverage of the Indianapolis market at the time).
WTHR
In late 1974, Avco Broadcasting Corporation (which Crosley Broadcasting was renamed in 1968) announced it was exiting the broadcasting business in an effort to raise cash. The Wolfe family, owners of the Columbus Dispatch and WBNS-AM-FM-TV in Columbus, bought WLWI from Avco in August 1975; the Wolfes changed the station's call letters to WTHR on January 29, 1976. To celebrate the callsign change, a marketing campaign was launched ("You're on Top with 13," whose jingle was composed by Al Ham). With new ownership in place, the quality of the station's programming began to improve, but WTHR remained stuck at third place in the ratings behind WISH and WRTV.
Meanwhile, ABC gradually rose to first place during the decade and was seeking out stronger affiliates in many markets. At the same time, NBC tumbled to last place among the "Big Three" networks. Under the circumstances, long-dominant WRTV was very receptive to an offer from ABC. WTHR and WRTV swapped networks on May 31, 1979, with channel 13 becoming the market's NBC affiliate and channel 6 becoming an ABC affiliate. Before signing with WTHR, NBC also considered affiliating with the longer-established WTTV. WTTV was heavily committed to sports programming that would lead to significant preemptions of network prime time programming, a factor that hurt WTTV in its negotiations with NBC. The final ABC program to air on WTHR was a repeat of Mork & Mindy at 7 p.m. on May 31, while the first NBC show on the station was the first part of the miniseries The Innocent and the Damned, which aired an hour later. On the same day as the switch, VideoIndiana, the Dispatch subsidiary that held WTHR's license, filed a $33 million antitrust lawsuit against ABC and WRTV's parent company McGraw-Hill, alleging that WRTV's switch was closely tied to an earlier ABC affiliation deal involving McGraw-Hill's San Diego station, KGTV. The switch to NBC eventually provided a major windfall for WTHR starting when the NFL's Indianapolis Colts moved from Baltimore in 1984; until NBC lost the rights to the NFL to CBS in 1998 (effectively moving the games to WISH-TV and later WTTV in 2015), WTHR aired the bulk of the team's regular season games under the AFC package. Ratings gradually improved in the 1980s with NBC's powerful prime time lineup, but not enough to get the station out of third place.
On April 7, 1991, WTHR participated in an experiment in which it moved NBC prime time programming one hour earlier (mirroring the scheduling of the network's prime time lineup in the Central and Mountain time zones); the half-hour late evening newscast also moved from 11 to 10 p.m. as a result. (The experiment, which lasted until the fall of 1992, was succeeded by similar efforts by KRON-TV and KPIX-TV in San Francisco, and KOVR in Sacramento later in the decade, though for WTHR, was also partly done to compensate for Indiana's long-term time zone adoption issues.)
Channel 13 first saw a significant ratings boost in the mid-1990s, buoyed by NBC's stronger programming as well as improvements in its news department. It has long since left its ratings-challenged past behind, and is now one of the strongest NBC affiliates in the nation.
On September 2, 2007, WTHR celebrated its 50th anniversary; the station used the song "Carousels (Dreaming of Tomorrow)" by Columbus-based rock band Alamoth Lane in an image campaign to promote the event (the song was also used in a market campaign by Columbus sister station WBNS to promote its upgrade to high definition newscasts).
WTHR shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 13, at 12:37 a.m. 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 station's digital signal relocated from its pre-transition UHF channel 46 to VHF channel 13 for post-transition operations.
In February 2009, WTHR began affiliating its third subchannel with Universal Sports. Starting in August 2009, WTHR preempted regular programming on the subchannel for high school football and basketball games under the titles, Operation Football Live and Operation Basketball Live, with marketing support from VYPE High School Sports Magazine. WTHR formerly operated the SkyTrak Weather Network, which was carried on WALV-CD (channel 50, now on channel 46, where the service first launched in 2000) and simulcast on digital subchannel 13.2.
On December 14, 2011, the Dispatch Broadcast Group signed an agreement with MeTV to affiliate with WTHR; the station began carrying the classic television network on its second digital subchannel on January 1, 2012, replacing Universal Sports (which converted into a cable- and satellite-only network on that date). On January 25, 2013, WALV-CD/WTHR .2 affiliated with the classic television and lifestyle network Cozi TV replacing SkyTrak Weather Network.
For the 2016 Summer Olympics from August 8 to 19, some of WTHR's syndicated programming was moved to WALV and its other subchannel. By May 26, 2017, WALV-CD began broadcasting MeTV, which stayed on WTHR 13.3, dropping Cozi TV programming. However, Cozi was retained by WTHR.2.
Due to reception problems in parts of Central Indiana with its VHF digital signal (including in areas on the fringe of its Grade B coverage such as Bainbridge and Crawfordsville) that did not occur with stations broadcasting on the UHF band following the transition, WTHR filed a request with the FCC in June 2013 to increase its transmitter power to 77,000 watts, which would exceed the commission's maximum power limit in effect at the time.WTHR to boost tower power on signal gripes, Indianapolis Business Journal, August 17, 2013.
On June 11, 2019, Dispatch announced it would sell its broadcasting assets, including WTHR and WALV-CD, to Tegna Inc. for $535 million in cash. It would make WTHR and WALV-CD sister stations to ABC affiliate WHAS-TV in adjacent Louisville and would also result in Tegna owning its first station in Indiana since its predecessor company, Gannett, sold off Fort Wayne's WPTA to the now-defunct Pulitzer, Inc. in May 1983. The sale was approved by the FCC on July 29, and was completed on August 8.
Until the start of 2024, WTHR broadcast the country network Circle on its sixth digital subchannel. When Circle switched from an OTA network to an ad-supported streaming channel, the 13.6 subchannel was deleted. The subchannel remained off the air for a month before it returned to the air with The Nest in February 2024.
On August 19, 2025, Nexstar Media Group agreed to acquire Tegna for $6.2 billion. In Indianapolis, Nexstar already owned WTTV and WXIN. The deal was approved and completed on March 19, 2026. As part of the transaction, Nexstar committed to the divestiture of WTHR within two years, along with five other stations, mostly in markets where the two companies combined held four TV station licenses. Combined with the March 31 sale of WRTV to WISH owner Circle City Broadcasting and the resulting consolidation of its operations, the "big four" network affiliates in Indianapolis are now controlled by only two companies.
Programming Sports programming From the arrival of the Indianapolis Colts in 1984 until 1997, WTHR (through NBC's rights to AFC games) aired regular season games televised locally with WISH-TV (channel 8) from 1984 until 1993 (for select games televised by CBS in which the Colts play against an NFC opponent), with WRTV—until 2005—carrying non-preseason games via ABC's Monday Night Football on occasions when a game involving the Colts was scheduled.