City of license Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! ===The relocation of an existing station=== Often, a license for a new station will not be available in a community, either because a regulatory agency was only willing to accept new applications within specified narrow timeframes or because there are no suitable vacant channels. A prospective broadcaster must therefore buy an existing station as the only way to readily enter the market, in some cases being left with a station in a suburban, outlying or adjacent-market area if that were the only facility available for sale. {|class="wikitable" |- !Broadcaster !City !Community of license !Comments |- ||[[CHRO-TV]] ||[[Ottawa]] ||[[Pembroke, Ontario|Pembroke]] ||Launched in the small city of Pembroke in 1961, the station struggled for financial viability until gaining carriage on cable systems in [[Ottawa]] and adding a news bureau there — but because it was affiliated with television networks that already had other affiliates in Ottawa proper, it was restricted to cable distribution. It was eventually acquired by [[CHUM Limited]] in 1997, and added an over-the-air transmitter in Ottawa after joining CHUM's [[NewNet]] system. CHUM subsequently centralized the station's operations and studios in Ottawa. The Ottawa transmitter is [[CHRO-TV#Digital television and high definition|1080i 16:9 digital widescreen]] and, on paper at least, purports to be rebroadcasting CHRO (VHF 5, a standard-definition analog station) from Pembroke. Technically, this is an impossibility — legally, however, the Pembroke transmitter is still the primary station. |- ||[[CHSC (AM)|CHSC]] ||[[Toronto]] ||[[St. Catharines]] ||After going into bankruptcy in 2002, the station was acquired by Pellpropco, a company which repurposed the station as a [[multilingual]] station aimed at the sizable [[Italian Canadian]] community in [[Toronto]]. After numerous additional license violations over the next number of years, the CRTC revoked the station's license in 2010.<ref name=shutdown>[http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2010/2010-533.htm CRTC Decision 2010-533].</ref> |- ||[[CBAT-DT]] ||[[Fredericton]] ||[[Saint John, New Brunswick|Saint John]] ||Originally a private [[CBC Television]] affiliate with the call sign CHSJ-TV, the station became the CBC affiliate for the entire province after [[CKCW-DT|CKCW-TV]] in [[Moncton]], the province's only other television station at the time, switched to [[CTV Television Network|CTV]] in 1969. Although CHSJ remained licensed to Saint John, some of the station's programming was produced in Fredericton due to that city's status as the provincial capital. The station was fully relocated to Fredericton in 1994 after becoming a fully owned-and-operated station of the network. The station's transmitter remained on-the-air in its original location until its 2012 analogue shutdown, but its Fredericton digital successor never reached the city, leaving no watchable over-the-air CBC television in Saint John. Only a limited amount of OTA TV from private broadcasters remains. |- ||[[KTUL|KTVX]] 8 [[American Broadcasting Company|ABC]] ||[[Tulsa, Oklahoma|Tulsa]] ||[[Muskogee, Oklahoma]] ||[[American Broadcasting Company|ABC]] was a distant third-place network with limited resources which struggled through much of the 1950s.{{efn|Much of the early content was sponsor-controlled, created by ad agencies or produced on a low budget. ABC TV (US) likely only survived the 1950s due to an injection of equity from United Paramount Theatres and because of the demise of the fourth-ranked [[DuMont Television Network]]. See http://uhfhistory.com/documents/Silverman_Thesis_ABC.pdf for an overview.}} By 1952, only 27 of the top 50 US markets had three or more VHF TV stations. Much like other two-station markets, the two commercial Tulsa VHF stations carried CBS ([[KOTV-DT|KOTV]] 6) and NBC ([[KJRH-TV]] 2). ABC appeared briefly on UHF ([[KCEB (Tulsa, Oklahoma)|KCEB 23]] failed in its first year) before landing on this outlying station in Muskogee. KTVX (now [[KTUL]]{{efn|At the time, [[KTUL|TV 8 Muskogee]] couldn't share the same base callsign as [[KTBZ (AM)|KTUL radio]] unless they had the same owner and same community of licence. This restriction, which no longer exists in the US, affected many other established radio broadcasters who'd looked elsewhere for an outlying VHF TV slot, including [[WHYY-TV|WHYY]]/[[WHYY-FM|WUHY]] Wilmington/Philadelphia and [[WWNY-TV|WCNY]]/[[WTNY|WWNY]] Carthage/Watertown.}}) obtained FCC approval in 1957 to move to Lookout Mountain, KCEB's former site in Tulsa, by [[KTUL#Transfer to Tulsa|claiming that Muskogee was too small]] to support a commercial television station. Its owner at the time, KTUL radio, was already well-established in Tulsa. It would be 1999 before Muskogee got another station of its own, CW affiliate [[KQCW-DT|KQCW]] 19. |- ||[[KNTV]] 11 [[NBC]] ||[[San Francisco]] ||[[San Jose, California]] ||[[NBC]] programming traditionally had been carried by [[KRON-TV]] 4, a San Francisco affiliate which NBC had unsuccessfully attempted to purchase outright for [[United States dollar|$]]750 million in 1999. Outbid by an outside buyer, NBC attempted to force the new owners to rebrand the station as "NBC 4" and greatly restrict the station's ability to schedule its programming differently from the main network. The new owners refused. NBC purchased the San Jose station for $230 million in 2001,<ref>[http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2001/12/17/daily1.html NBC to buy San Jose's KNTV, Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal, December 17, 2001]</ref> moving their network programming on January 1, 2002, and relocating KNTV's transmitters to [[San Bruno Mountain]] on September 12, 2005, over KRON's objections. The station's license and newly built studios remain in San Jose and the station has well-lapped KRON-TV, which is now affiliated with [[MyNetworkTV]] and shares a building with ABC's [[KGO-TV]]. |- ||[[WPKD-TV]] 19 [[Independent station|Independent]] ||[[Pittsburgh]] ||[[Jeannette, Pennsylvania]] ||Originally a [[Johnstown, Pennsylvania|Johnstown]] station, one of the rare instances in which the community of license for an existing channel has successfully been changed. WPKD-TV (then WTWB) managed to circumvent an [[Federal Communications Commission|FCC]] moratorium on new channel allocations in Pittsburgh by listing Jeannette, a small community of 11,000 people technically in the Pittsburgh market area, as the new city of license for an existing station.<ref>[http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Mass_Media/Notices/1997/da970540.txt FCC notice] of proposed rule making (Johnstown and Jeannette, Pennsylvania)</ref> Effectively a [[flag of convenience (business)|flag of convenience]], this maneuver portrays the station's owners as moving it from a community that had at least two other broadcasters (Johnstown) to one that had none (Jeannette)<ref>[http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Mass_Media/Orders/1997/da971503.txt FCC report and order] Table of Allotments, RM-8756 (Johnstown and Jeannette, Pennsylvania)</ref> - easier to justify for regulatory purposes. The actual intended target market, Pittsburgh, already has many local stations. While the transmitter remains in [[Jennerstown, Pennsylvania|Jennerstown]] (a small borough near Johnstown) and is inadequate to properly cover Pittsburgh over-the-air, this nominal community of license in the Pittsburgh market confers "[[must-carry]]" status for Pittsburgh's [[CATV|cable TV]] systems. Studios are at [[KDKA-TV]] Pittsburgh and city-grade coverage for Pittsburgh itself is supplied by a [[UHF]] [[broadcast translator|repeater]]. The main transmitters never were moved, and soon after taking a license to serve Jeannette the station applied for [[must-carry]] on cable in Johnstown, its former community of license.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Cable/Orders/1998/da980102.txt|title=FCC In re Petition of: Venture Technologies Group, Inc. CSR-5094-A For Modification of Market of Station WNPA-TV}}</ref> No physical connection of this station with the small community of Jeannette has ever existed except as a very clever [[legal fiction]].<ref>[http://www.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/stories/2000/09/11/daily18.html WNPA-TV moves under KDKA umbrella], Pittsburgh Business Times, September 13, 2000</ref> The station's old WPCW call sign was marketed using the slogan "Pittsburgh's CW", and has filed two [[construction permit]] applications to base a future digital transmitter within Allegheny County that would still give Jeannette a decent signal. Its current calls mentions Pittsburgh's initial, along with emulating KDKA's calls partially to further muddle the station's actual city. |- ||[[WPWR-TV]] 50 [[MyNetworkTV]] ||[[Chicago]] ||[[Gary, Indiana]] ||WPWR operates from Chicago studios, transmitting from the [[Willis Tower]] (formerly known as the Sears Tower), but is licensed out-of-state. Its owners obtained this channel allocation by first buying an existing construction permit for a Gary, Indiana, station which had been licensed as Channel 56 but never built, then swapping its channel allocations with [[WYIN]]—a [[Public Broadcasting Service|PBS]] member station also licensed to Gary, Indiana. WYIN had been refused a Sears Tower transmitter location as Chicago had two locally licensed PBS member stations before 2017. |- |[[WPXE]] 55 [[ION Television|ION]] |[[Milwaukee]] |[[Kenosha, Wisconsin]] |A station which came on the air in 1988 as an affiliate of the religious [[Lester Sumrall|LeSEA]] network with low penetration into the general Milwaukee area and some local programming for Kenosha mixed within the general LeSEA schedule, WHKE (as it was known at the time) was purchased in 1995 by Paxson Communications to become the eventual Milwaukee station for the PAX network due to that network's strategy of buying low-rated outlying stations to quickly launch their network, and since then the station has drifted continuously north of their city of license. The station's analog tower was actually located in north-central [[Racine County, Wisconsin|Racine County]],<ref name="autogenerated1">[http://www.fcc.gov/ftp/Bureaus/MB/Databases/fm_tv_service_areas/maps/TV249466.gif] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080625000221/http://www.fcc.gov/ftp/Bureaus/MB/Databases/fm_tv_service_areas/maps/TV249466.gif|date=June 25, 2008}}</ref> just close enough to serve the northern reaches of the Milwaukee area and still provide a city grade signal to Kenosha. The station has no Kenosha facilities and before the 2021 purchase of their parent company by the [[E. W. Scripps Company]], had their office in a small office suite the northern Milwaukee suburb of [[Glendale, Wisconsin|Glendale]], with its engineering often coming from a rotating employee also engineering other Ion stations across the Upper Midwest; the Glendale studio also served as the studio for [[Wausau, Wisconsin|Wausau]] area station [[WTPX-TV]]. Since then, its engineering operations have been consolidated with Scripps NBC affiliate [[WTMJ-TV]], though it still maintains a separate [[WITI TV Tower|transmitting tower]] from WTMJ,<ref name=autogenerated1 /> At the same time with the 2019 repeal of the Main Studio Rule, it (and many of its sister Ion stations, including WTPX) share a technical 'studio facility' based within [[Cincinnati]]'s [[Scripps Center]], though all of its operations outside of over-the-air signal transmission are based out of Ion's [[West Palm Beach, Florida]], headquarters, with WTMJ promoting subchannel availability of WPXE's networks occasionally. As of 2022, the only sign of WPXE's locality is WTMJ's engineer resolving transmitter and satellite faults, a local mailing address at WTMJ's Radio City studio, and its inclusion in WTMJ's [[retransmission consent]] negotiations. |- ||[[WTVE]] 51 [[Infomercial|Paid programming]] ||[[Philadelphia]] ||[[Reading, Pennsylvania|Reading]], now [[Willow Grove, Pennsylvania|Willow Grove]] ||An [[rimshot (broadcasting)|outlying UHF station]] which barely reached Philadelphia despite applying for ever-increasing amounts of power, WTVE had always been close to going off the air serving only Reading with various shopping and religious networks, along with a short-lived [[Telemundo]] affiliation. Instead of building one main digital transmitter, WTVE constructed a [[distributed transmission system]] composed nominally of eight co-channel transmitters in [[Reading, Pennsylvania|Reading]], [[Bethlehem, Pennsylvania|Bethlehem]], [[North East, Maryland|North East MD]], [[Quarryville, Pennsylvania|Quarryville]], [[Myerstown, Pennsylvania|Myerstown]], [[Lambertville, New Jersey|Lambertville]], [[Philadelphia, Pennsylvania|Philadelphia]] and [[Brockton, Massachusetts|Brockton]] for a combined total of 136.67[[kilowatt|kW]] of digital TV. As the bulk of this power (126 kW) was assigned to the Philadelphia transmitter, this configuration was effectively a full-power Philadelphia station with a series of small [[broadcast translator|low-power on-channel boosters]] covering the original service area and city of license. (Reading itself got 760 watts.) After the [[2016 United States wireless spectrum auction|repack]], it signed a channel-sharing agreement with a smaller lower-power station, was able to move its COL to Willow Grove, and transmit from Philadelphia's [[Roxborough, Philadelphia|Roxbourough]] tower site, then turned off the DTS system. WTVE and its channel-sharing partner were soon purchased by [[WRNN-TV|WRNN-TV Associates]], which has controversially only bought stations for their [[must-carry]] rights with no interest in running them traditionally, and currently runs a schedule dominated by paid programming on WTVE. |- ||[[WVEA-TV]] 62 [[Univisión]] (moved to channel 50) ||[[Tampa, Florida|Tampa]] ||[[Venice, Florida]] ||A Spanish-language station licensed to Venice, a community nearly 60 miles away from its Tampa studios and nearly 55 miles away from its [[Riverview, Florida|Riverview]] transmitter site, in a Tampa suburb. WVEA originally was an unprofitable English-language independent WBSV, which served the [[Sarasota, Florida|Sarasota]] / [[Bradenton, Florida|Bradenton]] / Venice area. In 2000, [[Entravision]] acquired WBSV and in 2001 moved the transmitter from Venice to Riverview, increasing transmitter power and adopting its current Spanish-language « ¡vea! » identity (meaning "I see"). Prior to the move, WVEA's programming was seen on a low-powered channel in Tampa. |- ||[[WWOR-TV]] 9 [[MyNetworkTV]] ||[[New York City]] ||[[Secaucus, New Jersey]] ||New York City's Channel 9, then having the [[call sign]] WOR-TV in 1983, was at that time owned by [[RKO General]]. Due to misconduct in its operations, RKO General was threatened with loss of its license to operate many of its broadcast stations, including WOR. RKO convinced [[New Jersey]] Senator [[Bill Bradley]] to introduce a bill in Congress guaranteeing an automatic renewal of a station's license if it moved to a state that did not have a [[VHF]] commercial television station under a claim of 'underservement'. Under that very specific criteria, only New Jersey and [[Delaware]] met those requirements (both states being dually served by stations from New York or [[Philadelphia]]). With the bill passed and signed by [[Ronald Reagan]], WOR relocated the station's operations to a business park in their new city of license, Secaucus (located directly across the [[Hudson River]] from [[Manhattan]]), and obtained an automatic license renewal, though their transmission facilities remained atop the [[World Trade Center (1973–2001)|World Trade Center]] in Manhattan and requirements for the station to properly serve New Jersey, an issue that has continued to affect WWOR's operations to the present day (their last license renewal was delayed by several years due to FCC claims it did not fulfill this directive). The 2018 repeal of the Main Studio Rule by the FCC ended the requirement by current WWOR owner [[Fox Television Stations]] to maintain any physical presence in their city of license of Secaucus, and the station's operations were merged into that of sister [[Fox Broadcasting Company|Fox]] flagship [[WNYW]] by 2019 in Manhattan, with the former New Jersey studios being demolished as of June 2019.<ref>{{cite news|url=https://hudsoncountyview.com/booker-menendez-want-new-rules-to-ensure-secaucus-based-tv-station-provides-nj-coverage/|title=Booker, Menendez want new rules to ensure Secaucus-based TV station provides NJ coverage|last=Heinis|first=John|date=4 February 2019|work=Hudson County View|access-date=6 June 2019}}</ref><ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.nj.com/hudson/2019/06/bye-bye-channel-9-demolition-begins-at-secaucus-based-tv-station.html|title=Bye, bye Channel 9: Demolition begins at Secaucus-based TV station|last=Villanova|first=Patrick|date=4 June 2019|work=NJ.com|access-date=6 June 2019}}</ref> |- |[[WBTS-CD]] 15<br />(formerly WYCN-CD) [[NBC]] |[[Boston]] |[[Nashua, New Hampshire]] |The newest example in this list, this was a result of the FCC's 2016 [[spectrum auction]] to [[Spectrum reallocation|reallocate television spectrum]] for the use of wireless devices. WYCN was previously a [[Low-power broadcasting|low-power]] community station serving Nashua carrying low-interest networks out of primetime, but was purchased by [[OTA Broadcasting]] in 2013, a company that mainly purchased stations to profit from their spectrum rather than a genuine interest in broadcasting. OTA won $80.4 million from the FCC for returning its spectrum, but also decided to retain the station's license for a channel sharing arrangement with another station, of which it had perfect timing; [[NBCUniversal]] was looking for both a full-market station and a way to broadcast their "[[NBC]] Boston" service (originating on equally low-power [[WYCN-LD|WBTS-LD]]) after their 2017 disaffiliation from [[WHDH (TV)|WHDH]]. OTA, NBC, and the [[WGBH Educational Foundation]] then made an arrangement where WYCN would be purchased from OTA by NBC's [[NBC Owned Television Stations|O&O group]], and WGBH would arrange to share their spectrum on secondary [[PBS]] member station [[WGBX-TV]], allowing NBC a full-market and central home for their NBC and [[Cozi TV]] programming in Boston on their signal, using the license of what is in technicality a low-power station. The station thus moved on January 18, 2018, from transmitting a low-power signal only serving Nashua, to a full-power signal transmitting {{convert|32|mi|km}} away in [[Needham, Massachusetts]], with NBC programming, sports and Boston news replacing the repeat-heavy [[Heroes & Icons]] network. In the summer of 2019 NBC coordinated a callsign swap between the two stations which made the now-WBTS-CD ''de facto'' full-power signal the main station in the NBC Boston service; the current WYCN-CD has since undergone a transmitter move and re-licensing to [[Providence, Rhode Island]], eventually revealed to be an extension of WBTS-CD's sister station, [[Telemundo]] O&O [[WNEU]] (channel 60) into Providence as a satellite station; WNEU itself is licensed to [[Merrimack, New Hampshire]], which moved its transmitter over thirty years from New Hampshire into the core of [[Greater Boston]]. |} Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). 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