WMEI

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WMEI

Shawano–Green Bay–Fox Cities, Wisconsin United States
City	Shawano, Wisconsin
Channels	Digital: 31 (UHF) Virtual: 31
Branding	MeTV Green Bay
Programming
Affiliations	31.1: MeTV for others, see § Subchannels
Ownership
Owner	Weigel Broadcasting (TV-49, Inc.)
History
First air date	June 24, 2024 (5 months ago) (2024-06-24)
Technical information[1]
Licensing authority	FCC
Facility ID	776266
ERP	1,000 kW
HAAT	332.7 m (1,092 ft)
Transmitter coordinates	44°20′0.1″N 87°58′55.7″W / 44.333361°N 87.982139°W / 44.333361; -87.982139
Links
Public license information	Public file LMS
Website	WMEI page on MeTV.com

WMEI (channel 31) is a television station licensed to Shawano, Wisconsin, United States. The station serves as an owned-and-operated outlet for Weigel Broadcasting's suite of over-the-air broadcast networks in the Green Bay–Fox Cities market, with its flagship network MeTV carried on its primary channel. WMEI's transmitter is located on Scray Hill southeast of Green Bay near Shirley, and the station is operated out of Weigel's Milwaukee studios, with no local presence in either Green Bay or Shawano.^[2]

Channel 31 was originally allocated to Wittenberg; though within Shawano County, which is assigned by Nielsen to the Green Bay market, it was instead utilized to provide a Fox affiliate for Wausau to the west, which originally had none and instead carried stations from Green Bay and Madison to provide the network to Wausau viewers due to a lack of demand for the network from its 1987 launch, nor any financially feasible way to launch an independent station at that time. The market's overall small population meant that NBC affiliate WJFW-TV (channel 12), based out of Rhinelander and the last station in the area to launch outside satellite stations before 1999, carried children's programming such as The Disney Afternoon on weekdays instead rather than programming for general audiences due to these issues unique to the market.

This changed in 1994 when Fox acquired the rights to carry NFC games from the National Football League. Wausau was long a secondary market for the Green Bay Packers, which had long aired their home contests on CBS affiliate WSAW-TV (channel 7) until the end of the 1993 season as part of the network's NFL package. ABC affiliate WAOW (channel 9) thus took a secondary affiliation with Fox from 1995 until 1999 to carry its NFL package, and some Fox content, and the network's rise through the last part of the 1990s finally brought forward a justification for a local Fox affiliate.

After receiving a waiver to serve the Wausau market instead with the allocation to Wittenberg, Davis Television signed on channel 55 as WFXS on December 1, 1999, as the market's Fox affiliate, though despite the expansion of network and syndicated programming, the station would struggle to remain on the air, including issues signing on its digital signal during the 2009 transition, where it was then allocated channel 31 as its permanent digital channel, though it continued to use virtual channel 55 through the remainder of its existence. Davis would sell WFXS's non-license assets to Gray Television (the current owner of WSAW-TV) on July 1, 2015, which moved to new low-power digital station WZAW-LD (channel 33), which took over WFXS's existing transmitter at a lower power. Davis Television would then turn the WFXS license into the FCC for cancellation on July 23, 2015.^[3] The channel 31 allocation would then be returned to the table of allotments for a future auction.

The FCC auctioned the Wittenberg allocation in the spring of 2022, with Weigel Broadcasting winning the auction and intending to relaunch it some time in 2024 as a Green Bay station in order to present a must-carry owned-and-operated station with main-channel carriage of MeTV, along with assured coverage of its other networks (MeTV Toons, H&I, and Start TV), once the station signed on the air, as Green Bay stations had begun to drop its networks due to preferential treatment of other station groups for their own networks developing over time.^[4] This became a priority for Weigel after WGBA-TV (channel 26) dropped MeTV shortly after its parent company acquired Ion Media.

In the summer of 2023, Weigel petitioned the FCC to relocate the city of license allocation east (while remaining in Shawano County) to the larger county seat of Shawano with a higher transmitter power, likely to allow the station to provide city-grade service to Shawano and Wittenberg from Scray's Hill, the main transmitter site for the Green Bay market, southeast of the city in the Town of Glenmore.^[5] In May 2024, the station was revealed to have a new callsign, WMEI, and the station launched on June 24, 2024.^[6] WMEI was the first full-power television station to sign on in Wisconsin in over 20 years.^[7]

In the 2024–25 season, WMEI, along with other Weigel stations in Wisconsin, began airing select Milwaukee Bucks games in simulcast with FanDuel Sports Network Wisconsin.^[8]

The station's signal is multiplexed:

• WMEI page on the MeTV website

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