Owned-and-operated Station

In the broadcasting industry (especially in North America), an owned-and-operated station (frequently abbreviated as O&O) usually refers to a television station or radio station that is owned by the network with which it is associated. This distinguishes such a station from an affiliate, whose ownership lies elsewhere other than the network it is linked to.

For example: in the Boston television market, CBS Corporation-owned WBZ-TV carries CBS programming, while News Corporation-owned WFXT-TV carries programming from Fox, another News Corporation subsidiary. Therefore, both WBZ and WFXT are considered owned-and-operated stations. On the other hand, WCVB-TV and WHDH-TV carry ABC and NBC programming respectively, but neither shares ownership ties with its parent network. As such, these two stations are considered affiliates.

The concept of O&O is more clearly defined in North America (and to some extent, several other countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia and Brazil), where network-owned stations had historically been the exception rather than the rule. In such places, broadcasting licenses are generally issued on a local (rather than national) basis, and there is (or was) some sort of regulatory mechanism in place to prevent any company (including a broadcasting network) from owning stations in every market in the country. In other parts of the world, many television networks were given national broadcasting licenses at launch; as such, they have traditionally been mostly (or entirely) composed of O&Os, rendering a separate notion for such a concept redundant.