FOX 5 Washington online - Television live

FOX 5 Washington Live Stream

Fox 5 Washington - WTTG - is the nation's capital's Fox station: a channel that began as the Washington outlet of the world's first commercial television network, survived that network's death to become one of the country's great independents, and then helped launch Fox itself. Owned and operated by Fox Television Stations and broadcasting from Wisconsin Avenue in Bethesda, Maryland, alongside sister station Fox 5 Plus (WDCA), it serves the Washington metropolitan area with news and Fox programming, and its newscasts also stream live online.

Few stations anywhere carry a lineage like this one: DuMont, Metromedia, Fox - three eras of American television, all anchored to channel 5 in Washington.

FOX 5 News and the Capital

Fox 5 News covers the capital region - the District, Northern Virginia, the Maryland suburbs and the Martinsburg, West Virginia area the station's own description names as its market - with newscasts through the day and the political beat that comes with a Washington address. Beyond the broadcast schedule, the station operates the FOX LOCAL DC round-the-clock live stream, carrying news and breaking coverage continuously alongside live event programming - a operation for a market whose news cycle never really stops. Sports coverage runs through the region's teams, and Fox's NFL Sundays put the Washington-adjacent audience's football on channel 5 every fall.

The DuMont Legacy

Channel 5 traces its history to 19 May 1945, when Allen B. DuMont put experimental station W3XWT on the air - the nation's capital's second experimental television outlet. The coaxial cable hookups DuMont ran between W3XWT and WABD in New York became the DuMont Television Network, the world's first commercial television network, and WTTG received the capital's first commercial television license that November; the first program it aired was a Washington Lions hockey game from Uline Arena. The call letters honor Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr., DuMont's chief engineer. When the DuMont network shut down in 1956, WTTG became an independent - and under John Kluge's Metromedia, it grew into one of the nation's leading independents of the 1970s: cartoons, sitcoms, movies, Georgetown Hoyas and Big East basketball, the afternoon talk institution Panorama - launched with a young Maury Povich among its hosts - and a superstation reach that put channel 5 on cable systems across Maryland and Virginia. In 1986, the Metromedia stations became the foundation of the Fox network, and WTTG has been a Fox owned-and-operated station ever since.

Bethesda and the Signal Today

Today WTTG and WDCA share studios on Wisconsin Avenue in Bethesda, transmitting through a channel-sharing arrangement from a tower on River Road, with a low-power translator extending the signal into West Virginia's Moorefield. The market it serves is one of the country's most layered - federal Washington, suburban Maryland and Northern Virginia, exurban West Virginia - and the station's live streams, apps and social presence keep the whole operation within reach of any screen in it: the last survivor of the first television network, still covering the capital.

FOX 5 Washington Watch Live Streaming now online