Fox 61 Hartford online - Television live

Fox 61 Hartford Live Stream

Fox 61 - WTIC-TV - is Hartford's Fox affiliate: a station born independent in 1984 that became one of the Fox network's original affiliates at its 1986 launch. Owned by the Tegna subsidiary of Nexstar Media Group and sharing studios on Broad Street in downtown Hartford with CW sister station WCCT, it serves the Hartford-New Haven market with Fox programming and a busy local newsroom, and its newscasts also stream live online.

Few stations have a founding story as particular as this one: an FCC comparative hearing that ran two years, a 28-year-old applicant who fell in love with television after watching "The China Syndrome," and a construction permit awarded to a consortium whose partners included a future CBS News correspondent and the son of Connecticut's governor.

Connecticut's Fox Station

Fox 61 News covers the Hartford-New Haven market from morning to night, with the weather desk a particular point of pride: when nor'easters sweep the Connecticut shoreline, the station's live radar broadcasts run continuously, tracking storm bands up Long Island Sound for viewers digging out from New Haven to the Massachusetts line. The newsroom's expansion owes much to a unusual chapter in its history - the years from 2000 to 2013 when the station was co-owned with the Hartford Courant, Connecticut's dominant newspaper. The cross-ownership brought newsroom collaboration and a significant expansion of local news programming, along with legal challenges and criticism that eventually ended the arrangement.

Born Independent, Fox from the Start

Channel 61 was Hartford's sleeping allocation: allotted since the 1960s, it sat unused into the 1980s while translators - including one relaying Spanish-language programming from New York - borrowed the frequency. Arch Communications, headed by Arnold Chase, the young son of WTIC AM-FM's owner, won the construction permit in September 1983 after a field of bidders that included Gene Autry's Golden West Broadcasters and the young Sinclair group. The station had planned to call itself WETG in memory of Governor Ella Grasso, who died in 1981 - her son James was among the partners - but when it signed on in June 1984 as the market's second independent, it arrived as WTIC-TV, tying the new station to Connecticut's best-known broadcasting name. The Fox affiliation came at the network's launch in 1986, and with it the ratings success that let channel 61 build a local news operation of its own.

The Tegna Era

After the Tribune years, Tegna acquired the station in 2019 in the divestitures that cleared Nexstar's purchase of Tribune Media, and the 2026 Nexstar-Tegna merger left the combined company holding three Connecticut licenses - Fox 61 and WCCT in Hartford alongside ABC's WTNH. The transmitter on Rattlesnake Mountain in Farmington carries the signal across the Connecticut River valley, and the Broad Street studios anchor a station that has grown from a movie-and-sitcom independent into one of the Northeast's established Fox newsrooms.

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