WLUK-TV

WLUK-TV (channel 11) is a television station in Green Bay, Wisconsin, United States, affiliated with the Fox network. It is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group alongside Suring-licensed CW affiliate WCWF (channel 14). The two stations share studios on Lombardi Avenue (US 41) on the line between Green Bay and Ashwaubenon; WLUK-TV's transmitter is located on Scray Hill in Ledgeview.

WMBV-TV, licensed to Marinette, Wisconsin (the callsign stood for "Marinette, Bay, Valley"), was approved for VHF channel 11 on November 18, 1953. M & M Broadcasting Company, owned by William Walker, announced the license grant after settling with a competing company for the rights to the license. An affiliation with NBC was confirmed on March 9, 1954. WMBV-TV signed on the air on September 10, 1954. Walker sold the station to Morgan Murphy Stations in 1958.

1959 saw several changes for the station. On February 1, WMBV swapped affiliations with WFRV-TV (channel 5), becoming an ABC affiliate. The station changed its city of license to Green Bay and on August 22, 1959, changed its call sign to the current WLUK-TV (in reference to its then on-air slogan "Lucky 11"), when it began broadcasting at full power from a new tower near Green Bay. WLUK first broadcast network programs in color in 1959 and local programs began to be broadcast in color starting in 1965. Morgan Murphy then sold WLUK to Post Corporation (a small media chain not affiliated with The Washington Post Company or its Post-Newsweek Stations division), whose properties included the Post-Crescent newspaper in nearby Appleton and a sister station in Marquette, Michigan, WLUC-TV. in 1965. In 1966, WLUK built a new studio and office building on Highland Avenue, which would eventually become Lombardi Avenue in 1968 after Vince Lombardi resigned his head coaching duties with the Green Bay Packers. It aired some local entertainment programs, including a Saturday night polka show and a daily children's cartoon show using the franchised Bozo the Clown character.

On April 18, 1983, WLUK reclaimed the market's NBC affiliation, when WFRV switched to ABC. In 1984, Racine native George N. Gillett's Gillett Broadcasting purchased Post Corporation. Gillett in turn sold the station to Burnham Broadcasting later that year, as the company's first television acquisition, in order to purchase the KKR stations (which included future fellow Fox station WITI in Milwaukee; WLUK was indeed sold due to adjacent market ownership regulations at the time by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)). For most of its second stint with NBC, WLUK largely downplayed its affiliation, even during the network's powerhouse days of the 1980s; it used the NBC Peacock only sparingly in the station's advertisements.

On July 29, 1994, Burnham Broadcasting sold WLUK-TV to SF Broadcasting – a joint venture of Savoy Communications and the Fox Broadcasting Company, then a division of News Corporation – for $38 million; the company later sold three of its other four stations (KHON-TV in Honolulu, WVUE in New Orleans and WALA-TV in Mobile, Alabama) for $229 million on August 25 (a fifth Burnham station, KBAK-TV in Bakersfield, California, was excluded from the deal and was instead spun off to Westwind Communications, a new company that was formed by several former Burnham executives). As a result of the deal, SF Broadcasting announced that the four stations would become Fox affiliates; both Savoy and Fox shared ownership with Fox originally choosing to hold voting stock, ultimately opting not to retain it prior to the closure of the sale of the stations. The purchase was challenged by NBC, which filed a petition with the FCC on September 23, 1994, alleging that News Corporation had improperly set up a shell corporation to circumvent FCC limits on the amount of monetary capital that a foreign company is allowed to invest in an American television station in order to gain control of WLUK. NBC later withdrew its petition against the acquisition on February 17, 1995. The FCC approved the WLUK purchase on April 27, 1995.

WLUK became a Fox affiliate on August 28, 1995, swapping affiliations with WGBA-TV (channel 26), which had acquired the Fox affiliation three years earlier after WXGZ-TV (channel 32, now WACY-TV) shut down due to financial issues. Like most former "Big Three" network affiliates that switched to Fox during that time, WLUK picked up almost no syndicated programming from WGBA, though it was unnecessary because of WGBA's local marketing agreement with WACY-TV; WGBA's programming largely moved to that station instead. The final NBC program to air on WLUK was a repeat of the NBC Sunday Night at the Movies feature Wayne's World at 8 p.m. on August 27, 1995.

Because of Fox's 1994 acquisition of television rights to the NFL's National Football Conference, the switch made WLUK the unofficial "home" station of the Green Bay Packers after years on WBAY (and two years on WFRV), which became a major ratings draw (during the 1994 season, WGBA was the station of record for the Packers). Unlike the New World Communications stations that converted to Fox affiliates, WLUK carried Fox Kids programming, running it one hour earlier on weekday afternoons from 1 to 4 p.m. The station ran Fox Kids until the weekday block ended in December 2001 (when it had been pushed back to as early as 10 a.m.), and its successor Saturday morning children's blocks known as Fox Box and later 4KidsTV until the latter block ended nationally in December 2008, when 4Kids Entertainment and Fox parted ways due to a contract dispute. By the time 4Kids TV ended its run, Fox permanently discontinued providing network-supplied children's programming, replacing it with the infomercial block Weekend Marketplace. Fox would return to children's programming in 2014 as Xploration Station replaced Weekend Marketplace.

Since channel 11 joined Fox, Packer football games have routinely drawn an 80% share of the viewing audience – far and away the highest-rated programs in the market, and through Fox's NFL rights deal, the station has broadcast two of the three Super Bowl games the Packers have appeared in, both victories, since 1994; Super Bowls XXXI and XLV, both by far the highest-rated programs in the Green Bay market's history.