USA Broadcasting

USA Broadcasting was an American media company owned by veteran entertainment industry executive Barry Diller. This network was the over-the-air broadcasting arm of USA Network.

USAB dates back to the mid-1990s when Diller purchased Silver King Broadcasting from Lowell W. "Bud" Paxson and Roy Speer. Paxson and Speer had assembled the group to expand their company, Home Shopping Network, onto broadcast television. The stations carried the Home Shopping Club (now America's Store).

Diller planned to remove shopping shows from most of the stations' broadcast days and replace them with local and syndicated programs. He wanted to tie each of the stations very closely to the communities they served, and to open up opportunities for locally-produced programs.

By 2000, four stations were transformed into Diller's new model: WAMI-TV (WAMI "Whammy" 69) in Miami, WHOT ("Hotlanta 34") in Atlanta, WHUB ("Hub" 66) in Boston, and KSTR ("K-Star" 49) in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. WAMI and KSTR aired local news, talk shows and sporting events. WHOT and WHUB aired syndicated programming as well as local sports. WAMI aired Miami Heat basketball and Florida Marlins baseball games. WHOT and KSTR also carried pro basketball games of, respectively, the Atlanta Hawks and Dallas Mavericks. WHUB acquired the rights to the annual Beanpot hockey tournament between four of Boston's colleges and also rights to Boston University's Men's Hockey games. HSC/America's Store continued to air on late nights and weekends.

There were also plans to convert stations in New York, Los Angeles (proposed callsign: KLIK, "Click") and Chicago (proposed callsign: WNDE, "Windy") to the new local-TV model. However, in late 2001, Diller suddenly sold the stations to Univision, which converted them into Spanish language outlets; some affiliated with Univision, but most joined its new sister network, Telefutura, which launched in January 2002. Diller still owns HSN and other interactive and shopping services on television and online.

Other stations

Silver King/USAB also briefly owned four Fox affiliate stations: WLUK (Green Bay, Wisconsin), KHON (Honolulu, Hawaii), WALA (Mobile, Alabama), and WVUE (New Orleans, Louisiana). That ownership was in 1999 and 2000 before the four stations were sold to Emmis Communications. Emmis eventually departed from television ownership and resold the stations to other parties, including LIN Television and in WVUE's case, a group led by New Orleans Saints owner Tom Benson.

tations owned by USA Broadcasting