The CW Plus is a secondary national broadcast television syndication service feed of The CW, which is controlled by Nexstar Media Group, which holds a 81.1% ownership interest in the network, with Skydance Corporation holding an 18.9% stake. It is intended primarily for American television markets ranked #100 and above by Nielsen Media Research estimates. The service is primarily carried on digital subchannels and multichannel subscription television providers, although it maintains primary affiliations on full-power and low-power stations in certain markets.
Along with airing the network's prime time, Saturday morning and live sports programming, The CW Plus offers a master schedule of first-run, off-network and brokered programs available for syndication distribution to fill the network's dark time. The CW handles programming and promotional services for The CW Plus at its corporate headquarters in Burbank, California (marketing services were handled through a separate division for the service until March 2008, when these operations were transferred to The CW's marketing department due to layoffs); centralcasting operations for the CW Plus affiliates are hubbed at the California Video Center in Los Angeles.
History Background (The WB 100+ Station Group)
The CW Plus traces its existence to The WB 100+ Station Group (initially known as The WeB until March 1999), a similar national feed of CW co-predecessor, The WB, which began operations on September 21, 1998. Conceived under the same concept as Foxnet (developed by WB network co-founder and original president Jamie Kellner during his preceding tenure as the original president of the Fox network), The WB 100+ was designed to distribute WB programming to small- and select medium-sized "white area" markets, primarily Designated Market Areas (DMA) ranked #100 and higher under annual Nielsen Market Universe estimates, that had five or fewer commercial television stations licensed within the designated market area through local cable providers (which owned affiliates of the feed individually or in consortiums, often entering into agreements with a local broadcast station to handle advertising and other management services for the WB 100+ outlet), or stations The WB refused to make affiliation offers due to overall low broadcasting quality standards or giving a priority to another network.
By its design, the initial cable-only composition of The WB 100+ Station Group’s affiliate body acted as a workaround to issues that The WB had encountered since its December 1993 founding with securing broadcast affiliates; these difficulties resulted in The WB having to rely on the national superstation feed of Chicago affiliate WGN-TV (later WGN America, relaunched as NewsNation in March 2021) to distribute its programming to markets without existing over-the-air WB affiliates. (In certain “white area” markets, the only option for over-the-air carriage was to maintain a secondary affiliation with an existing network outlet, subjecting WB programs to being aired via tape delay outside of key timeslots.) Beginning in 2002, The WB 100+ added conventional broadcast affiliations in the few eligible markets that had at least five commercial stations; the feed continued to operate until The WB ended operations on September 17, 2006.
Development and concept
On February 24, 2006, one month after CBS Corporation (later ViacomCBS, now Paramount Global) and Time Warner (later WarnerMedia, now Warner Bros. Discovery) announced the launch of the new network, The CW formally released a proposal to prospective affiliates announcing the creation of The CW Plus, a similar single-network feed for smaller markets – covering the same areas that were served by The WB 100+. While there was no guarantee that existing affiliates of The WB 100+ would automatically join The CW Plus, most of them (particularly cable-only affiliates) ultimately did join the new service, and programming transitioned seamlessly from The WB 100+ to The CW Plus.
Since The WB 100+ was created before digital television was easily available in the United States, most WB 100+ stations were distributed exclusively via local cable television providers, with a few main channel affiliations on broadcast television stations. With its launch, The CW (along with MyNetworkTV) became among the first conventional broadcast networks in the U.S. to fully utilize digital multicasting to gain over-the-air coverage in markets that did not have enough television stations to maintain a traditional main channel affiliation (Fox, The WB and fellow CW predecessor UPN had a few subchannel-only affiliates shortly before The CW launched; however, over-the-air distribution in this manner was very limited at the time).
In several markets served by a CW Plus station, the current affiliate may not be the same as the prior WB 100+ affiliate. Many local CW Plus outlets located in markets where the predecessor WB 100+ affiliate was cable-exclusive are instead carried on a digital subchannel of a local broadcast station, usually an affiliate of a competing "Big Four" network (ABC, NBC, CBS or Fox). This distribution method resulted in an unusual quirk for The CW itself in Florence–Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in which WWMB programmed its main channel as a conventional CW outlet (airing the network’s base schedule, accompanied by syndicated and paid programs that were acquired and slotted by the station) while simultaneously offering the CW Plus feed (a byproduct of former WWMB owner SagamoreHill Broadcasting inheriting the assets of cable-only WB 100+ affiliate "WFWB”) over its DT2 subchannel. (WWMB’s main CW affiliation moved to the DT2 subchannel of ABC-affiliated sister WPDE-TV on September 20, 2021, with Dabl replacing CW network and syndicated programs previously shown on its main channel and TBD replacing The CW Plus on WWMB-DT2.) Certain cable-only affiliates of The WB 100+ have been replaced completely by either a subchannel or main channel broadcast affiliation when The CW launched or joined The CW Plus only for a broadcast station that managed or acquired it to begin carrying it over-the-air at some point after its launch.
As with The WB 100+, CW Plus programming is delivered through a data server network that originally digitally transmitted locally and national advertisements, promos, station identifications and customized logo bugs for each individual affiliate to headends within the master control facilities of a local station or the offices of the multichannel television provider operating the local affiliate. That was the case with The WB 100+, promotions for syndicated programs aired on The CW Plus omit affiliate references – either in the form of verbal identification or use of the affiliate's logo – in favor of network branding; the timeslot cards also only list airtimes based on Eastern and Central Time Zone scheduling, with the announcer being used to read the promo's airtime card only identifying that the program airs "[today/tonight/day of week] on The CW."
Programming is relayed to a wireless PC-based system that downloads (through a data feed distributed via satellite), stores and inserts advertising during program breaks controlled via a playlist over the satellite-delivered national feed to the individual affiliate's home market; the units also transfer program feeds via address headers disseminated to each affiliate based on their call letters, transmit advertisements and program promotions, and generate a log of ads that have previously aired. The cost of these units is partially reimbursed by The CW, with no more than 50-percent of the purchase cost paid by the affiliate. Affiliates sent log files of local advertisements over the Internet to a traffic management system located at The CW's corporate offices in Burbank, which handles trafficking, dissemination of the program feed and specified local insertion of advertisements and promotions to each affiliate. After The CW stopped providing support for the traffic system and commercial server in September 2009, responsibility for ad trafficking and insertion was transferred to The CW Plus' individual affiliates, although The CW continues to handle programming and transmission operations.
CW Plus stations are generally managed and promoted by a local affiliate of a larger over-the-air television station, which may produce some local programming (such as morning and/or prime time newscasts), telecasts of local sports events, network events from CW Sports or syndicated national sports broadcasts; some affiliates, however, are operated by a local cable provider.
CW Plus affiliates each have their own local branding, which is usually a combination of the CW name with either the parent station/cable franchise's city of license or a regional descriptor of the area (such as "Northland" for Duluth and northeastern Minnesota, as seen in the logo to the above left). Unlike its predecessor, The WB 100+ Station Group, The CW Plus does not use call signs used solely for branding and/or supplementary identification purposes in a widespread fashion; while many cable-only WB 100+-turned-CW Plus affiliates have stopped using fictional call signs (which were not assigned by the Federal Communications Commission, as the agency does not issue licenses to cable channels), a few have continued to use the ones they had used while part of The WB 100+ Station Group, mainly doing so merely for identification purposes in local Nielsen diary-tabulated ratings reports.
The CW Plus originally maintained a separate website featuring promotions for CW network programs, search maps for CW Plus affiliates, programming schedules customizable to an affiliate's local time zone, and still promotional ads for CW network shows and syndicated programs are seen on the CW Plus feed. In May 2014, YourCWTV.com was discontinued as a standalone website, redirecting to The CW's main website at CWTV.com. However, the websites of all CW Plus affiliates continue to be hosted on the YourCWTV.com domain, featuring much of the aforementioned content seen on the national website; as well as links to websites and social media pages operated by the affiliate or a parent over-the-air station, and links to the affiliate's contact information, advertising services and (where applicable) the main website of a parent broadcast affiliate. A separate website for the service was reinstated in September 2017, under the CWPlusTV.com domain.