WBTV - History

History

WBTV signed on for the first time on July 15, 1949. It was the 13th television station in the United States and the first in the Carolinas, and is the oldest station between Richmond and Atlanta. Veteran Charlotte broadcaster Jim Patterson was the first person seen on the station, and remained there until his death in 1986. It was owned by Jefferson Standard Insurance Company of Greensboro along with WBT (1110 AM), the city's oldest radio station and the first fully licensed station in the South. Jefferson Standard had purchased WBT from CBS in 1947. Shortly before the TV station went on the air, its call letters were modified from WBT-TV to WBTV. Jefferson Standard merged with Pilot Life in 1968 (though it had owned controlling interest since 1945) and became Jefferson-Pilot Corporation.

WBTV received one of the last construction permits issued before the Federal Communications Commission's "freeze" on new television licenses, which lasted until the Commission released its Sixth Report and Order in 1952. As such, it was Charlotte's only VHF station for eight years, carrying affiliations with all four major networks of the time – CBS, NBC, ABC and DuMont. However, it has always been a primary CBS affiliate, owing to WBT radio's long affiliation with CBS Radio. It is the only commercial station in the market that has never changed its affiliation.

Channel 3 originally broadcast from a converted radio studio in the Wilder Building, alongside its radio sister. In 1955, WBT and WBTV moved to a then state-of-the-art facility on a hill atop Morehead Street. The stations are still based there today. The studio address, One Julian Price Place, is named in honor of a longtime Jefferson Standard/Jefferson-Pilot executive.

WBTV's only competition in the early years came from a UHF station on channel 36, known as WAYS-TV and then WQMC-TV, which broadcast briefly from 1953 to 1955. It was nominally an NBC affiliate sharing a secondary ABC affiliation. However, channel 36's signal was painfully weak, and NBC continued to allow WBTV to cherry-pick its stronger programming. Channel 36 went dark in March 1955, and DuMont shut down roughly a year later. All three networks remained shoehorned on channel 3 for over a year until Charlotte's second VHF station, WSOC-TV, signed on in 1957; it took the NBC affiliation. Channel 36 returned to the air in 1964 as WCCB (moving to channel 18 in 1966), picking up whatever CBS shows WBTV turned down to carry ABC programming. ABC continued to be split between the three stations until 1967, when WCCB became a full ABC affiliate.

From 1958 to 1974, WBTV's studios were the home for Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling broadcasts. Since its completion in 1984, WBTV's signal has been broadcast from a 2,000 feet (610 m) high guy-wired aerial mast transmitter tower located in north-central Gaston County, North Carolina, which is also shared with former radio sister WBT.

When WAGA-TV in Atlanta (which signed on four months before WBTV) switched to Fox in 1994, WBTV became the longest-tenured CBS affiliate south of Washington, D.C. WFMY-TV in Greensboro, the second-oldest station in the Carolinas (which signed on three months after WBTV), is also second in this category. Two years later, after KPIX in San Francisco became a CBS owned and operated station (due to owner Westinghouse Electric Corporation's merger with CBS), WBTV became the second longest-tenured affiliate not owned by the network, behind only Washington's WUSA.

Over the years, Jefferson Standard/Jefferson-Pilot acquired several other radio and television stations across the country, with WBTV as the flagship station. In 2006, Jefferson-Pilot merged with Lincoln National Corporation of Philadelphia. Lincoln Financial retained Jefferson-Pilot's broadcasting division, which was renamed Lincoln Financial Media. WBTV remained the flagship station.