You Loved Us Then / You’ll Love Us Now
ThinkTV and CET have been serving our communities for more than 60 years, bringing educational and public television content to homes (and, more recently, mobile devices) across Southwest Ohio. Our little family of stations has been through a lot – changes in names, programming, technology, buildings, formats and many other aspects of our operations – and, through it all, we’ve remained committed to bringing much-needed programming to our community.
Public television is one of those things that has remained a constant in the US for decades… so much so that it’s easy to take it for granted. Public television hasn’t always been there and the future is always unknown. Did you know that most of our budget comes from donations from our members – truly Viewers Like You? It’s true! While public media organizations do receive tax dollars, it amounts to about $1.40 per year, per American.
As we continue to grow and evolve, we thought it would be fun to take a look back at where we started, where we are now, and how we got here!
Then
ThinkTV first hit the air on March 20, 1967. It was quite the journey to get there, though. The channel was originally set up for educational television. In 1953, the attempts to get it off the ground came to a halt, as many believed there just wasn’t a logistical way to make it happen in the area. However, in 1965, there was some re-shuffling of station assignments and allocations in the area, and just a couple of years later, ThinkTV hit the air as WKTR-TV Channel 16 with eight hours of programming planned.
In 1987, the station moved to a newly constructed studio building. The facility had a notable lack of windows in its design, leading the city of Dayton to adopt new construction standards for all future building projects in the city. The new station facility opened in 1988, and it has lived there ever since.
While WKTR-TV hit the air in 1967, the beginning of educational television in the Miami Valley actually began in 1959 when WMUB Channel 14 signed on at Miami University.
WKTR-TV continued to operate for a number of years under different names, like WOET (Ohio Educational Television) until, in 1998, the station was rebranded and relaunched as ThinkTV, winning them the PBS National Branding Campaign Award that year.
Channels 16 and 14 finally joined together in 1975 under University Regional Broadcasting, and in 1976, operations for both channels moved from Oxford to Dayton, where they became a part of Greater Dayton Public Television.
Coming Together
ThinkTV and CET joined together in 2009 as one big happy public broadcasting family known as Public Media Connect. Both stations continued to operate almost independently until 2010, when the Master Control operations for both stations moved to Dayton, where their team oversees the operations of both markets.
Now
ThinkTV has grown into so much more than just a single station of educational television and not a day goes by when we aren’t challenging ourselves to serve our communities and our audiences. Whether it’s on-the-air or online, we always want to be that constant source of entertainment, information and community that we’ve strived to be since we first hit the airwaves.
We’re so glad you’ve been with us on this adventure so far and we’re excited for you to join us as we keep moving down the road to the next one, because every day is a new adventure at ThinkTV!
