Description
Sunbeam Television Corporation is a privately held broadcasting company based in Miami, Florida, that owns three television stations in the United States. Since the company's founding in 1953, it has been under the control of the Ansin family.
History
Sunbeam Television was founded on December 16, 1953, by Sidney Ansin, who inherited his family's shoemaking business in Massachusetts and later purchased South Florida real estate in the years after World War II, eventually settling in Miami Beach. Ansin's company was formed as one of five bidders for the channel 7 license in Miami, with sons Ronald and Edmund Ansin included as they had expressed interest in television themselves. While Biscayne Television Corporation, a three-way partnership between newspaper publishers James M. Cox and John S. Knight, along with former NBC president Niles Trammell, won the bidding process with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and signed on WCKT, their license was ultimately revoked after a combination of ethics violations within the FCC and improper conduct between the commissioners and Biscayne management. Sunbeam won a replacement license after it was determined that their bid was the only one amongst the original bidders conducted in an ethical manner, and purchased the assets of the former WCKT for their license, re-using the WCKT call sign.
Ed Ansin was installed as WCKT's executive vice president upon Sunbeam's takeover of the station. He became the company's president and chief operating officer after Sidney's death in October 1971. WCKT would change its call letters to WSVN in 1983 and would remain Sunbeam's lone property until 1993, when they acquired WHDH in Boston from New England Television.
As part of a wide-ranging series of asset sales by Tribune Broadcasting totaling $500 million, Sunbeam purchased Tribune's Boston CW affiliate WLVI for $117.3 million on September 14, 2006. When Sunbeam took control of the station on December 18, 2006, all local operations at WLVI ceased, with WLVI moving into WHDH's studios and WHDH-produced newscasts taking the place of WLVI's former 10 p.m. newscast.
Following Ed Ansin's death on July 26, 2020, ownership of Sunbeam Television was passed on to his sons Andrew and James, a wish Ed had publicly expressed as early as 1987. Andrew Ansin was appointed as Sunbeam's president/CEO on August 3, 2020.
