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WUTB (channel 24) is a television station in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, airing programming from the digital multicast network Roar. It is owned by Deerfield Media, which maintains a shared services agreement (SSA) with Sinclair Broadcast Group, owner of Fox/MyNetworkTV affiliate WBFF (channel 45), for the provision of certain services. Sinclair also operates The CW affiliate WNUV (channel 54) under a separate local marketing agreement (LMA) with Cunningham Broadcasting. However, Sinclair effectively owns WNUV as the majority of Cunningham's stock is owned by the family of deceased group founder Julian Smith. The stations share studios on 41st Street off the Jones Falls Expressway in the Woodberry neighborhood of north Baltimore. Through a channel sharing agreement, WUTB and WBFF transmit using the latter station's spectrum from an antenna adjacent to the studios.
The construction of WKJL-TV went very slowly. The founder, Rev. Philip Zampino, moved to Florida, and the license fight had saddled Jesus Lives with legal fees. By 1982, the station project a late 1984 launch. $75,000 had been raised to purchase and prepare a site in the Randallstown area, of $100,000 needed. However, fundraising continued to lag, and so too did construction activities. Jesus Lives, which renamed itself Look and Live Ministries, accepted a $100,000 loan from Liberty Baptist College, owned by Jerry Falwell, in late 1984 to accelerate the process. Right before going on air, Look and Live agreed to sell the station to Family Media Inc., a subsidiary of Christian publishing company Thomas Nelson.
Family Media completed construction, and on December 24, 1985, channel 24 returned to Baltimore nearly 14 years after it had left, as WKJL-TV. Family Media harbored intentions of possibly expanding with more stations to feature family programming and conservative-oriented news. It also briefly tried its hand at a local children's show, Pop's Place with Stu Kerr.
However, the Baltimore entertainment market had changed rapidly around the time that WKJL-TV started. Where Baltimore had one independent station, it suddenly had three: WBFF, WKJL-TV, and WNUV-TV, which had devoted its evenings to Super TV subscription service until March 31, 1986. The boom in independents coincided with a flattening of national advertising revenues, squeezing stations economically. In this environment, Family Media bowed out after less than a year and filed to sell the station to Silver King Broadcasting, the stations division of the Home Shopping Network, which was purchasing outlets in major markets. In October 1986, the station added 18 hours a day of HSN programming, conserving six hours daily of its existing programming and a six-hour religious block on Sunday mornings. The FCC granted full approval in January 1987, at which time the station began 24-hour HSN broadcasting with the new call sign of WHSW.
On January 18, 1998, the WNUV affiliation switch to The WB took effect, and channel 24 began airing UPN programming under new WUTB call letters. Days prior, the FCC had approved the sale of the station. WUTB was thrown together in four weeks, allowing UPN to remain on the air in the market without a single day of lost network programming. In its first year, the station immediately began outperforming the national ratings for UPN. Chris-Craft ran the station out of then-sister station WWOR-TV's facilities in Secaucus, New Jersey, and fed the station's programming to its transmitter site in Baltimore; this included WWOR's local news coverage of the September 11 attacks. On July 25, 2001, Fox Television Stations purchased WUTB and the other Chris-Craft stations; the purchase led to some speculation that WBFF would lose Fox programming. WBFF, along with Sinclair's 19 other Fox affiliates, would renew their affiliations in November 2002, keeping UPN on WUTB.
On May 15, 2012, as part of a five-year affiliation agreement extension between Fox and Sinclair's 19 Fox affiliates (including WBFF) through 2017, Fox included an option for Sinclair to purchase WUTB, exercisable from July 1, 2012, to March 31, 2013. In exchange, Fox received an option to buy any combination of six Sinclair-owned CW and MyNetworkTV affiliates (two of which were standalone stations affiliated with the latter service) in three of four markets: Raleigh (WLFL and WRDC), Las Vegas (KVCW and KSNV), Cincinnati (WSTR-TV) and Norfolk, Virginia (WTVZ). On November 29, 2012, Sinclair exercised its option to purchase WUTB through Deerfield Media for $2.7 million.
In January 2013, Fox announced that it would not buy any of the Sinclair stations included in the purchase option. On May 6, 2013, the FCC granted its approval of WUTB to Deerfield Media, which was formally consummated on June 1. Sinclair began operating WUTB under a local marketing agreement, and operations moved to the WBFF-WNUV studio center in Woodberry.
During the 2006 MLB postseason, WTTG's 10 p.m. newscast aired on Washington's MyNetworkTV station WDCA under the name Fox 5 News at 10 Special Edition, while continuing to be simulcast on WUTB. The same situation occurred in 2007, but the newscast was known as My 20 News at 10. When Fox Sports or other programming delayed the 10 p.m. newscast from airing on WTTG, it was still produced for WUTB. The station dropped the morning news simulcast after the November 30, 2007, edition and the 10 p.m. simulcast was discontinued by January 2008.
On January 8, 2016, Sinclair announced that American Sports Network would launch as a dedicated, digital multicast network under the American Sports Network name with 10 stations including WUTB on January 11, 2016.
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