The Waterloo, IA television station has been off the air for a week, its operations chief Verner Nelson told KCRG-TV. KWWF, owned by Waterloo Television Group LLC of Davenport, went off the air at 4 p.m. 8/2
“What I was told is the owners decided to discontinue,” Nelson said of the decision to go off the air.
A Thursday online filing with the FCC lists financing as the reason the station went silent. The station had gone off the air before in January 2003, Nelson said. The station also went silent in 2009, he said.
KWWF signed on December 1, 2002, with a format of infomercials, home shopping, and reruns that were in the public domain. It then began rebroadcasting religious programs from LeSEA Broadcasting. Equity Broadcasting bought the station in the summer of 2004 and made it a general entertainment station. KWWF affiliated with UPN on September 13, 2004, and the station soon gained carriage on cable systems throughout the market.
In 2006, with the end of UPN, KWWF became an affiliate of Equity Broadcasting’s Retro Television Network to fill the gaps left by the end of UPN programming. In 2008, most RTN programming was removed from KWWF and moved to a digital subchannel of Quincy Newspapers KWWL-TV (NBC) in that market. KWWF became an independent station, carrying various syndicated programs as well as a handful of Equity-produced live shows, which were also aired on many RTN stations.
KWWF was sold at auction to Valley Bank on 4/16/09. Valley Bank, in turn, filed to sell KWWF to an ownership group connected to Fusion Communications that August. In 2012, Fusion Communications was acquired by Stratus Media Holdings. KWWF went digital on June 12, 2009, and was affiliated from that point with the Untamed Sports TV network.
