WKBW-TV - History

History

The Channel 7 frequency was hotly contested during the 1950s; the Buffalo Courier-Express and former WBUF-TV owner Sherwin Grossman tried several times to gain rights to the channel (to compete with The Buffalo News's WBEN-TV) but was unable to secure a license. The competition for the channel continued to grow when the city's first UHF station, WBES-TV, failed. Clinton Churchill, original owner of 50,000 watt radio station WKBW AM 1520 in Buffalo, was granted the license to operate the station in 1957.

WKBW was originally intended to be an independent station. However, when NBC closed its owned and operated station, WBUF-TV (now WNED-TV), on September 30, 1958, then-ABC affiliate WGR-TV (now WGRZ-TV) went back to NBC. As a result of the network shuffle, WKBW-TV premiered as ABC's new Buffalo affiliate when it went on the air on November 30, 1958. The station was originally located at 1420 Main Street, and remained there until it moved to its current location at 7 Broadcast Plaza in downtown Buffalo in 1978.

Churchill sold the WKBW stations to Capital Cities Broadcasting (which later became Capital Cities Communications) in 1961. CapCities would serve as WKBW-TV's longest tenured owner, having owned it and its radio sister for 25 years, and the station would reach its peak during Capital Cities' ownership. WKBW-TV produced iconic children's programing such as Rocketship 7 and The Commander Tom Show from the 1960s through the 1980s. A staple of its morning programing for many years was Dialing for Dollars, which later became AM Buffalo after the Dialing for Dollars franchise was discontinued. AM Buffalo still airs today.

When Capital Cities merged with ABC in 1986, it sold WKBW-TV to Queen City Broadcasting, a minority-owned firm, instead of becoming an ABC O&O. At that point WKBW radio was sold to Price Communications and renamed WWKB (currently owned by Entercom Communications).

In late 1993, the Granite Broadcasting Corporation acquired a large minority (45 percent) stake in WKBW-TV from Queen City Broadcasting. A year and a half later, in June 1995, Granite bought the remainder of the station. Until 2000, lottery drawings were shown on WKBW-TV (they have since moved to WGRZ).

WKBW, through at least the early 2000s, operated the Niagara Frontier Radio Reading Service on its second audio program. It was pulled after NFRRS began reading content that was of questionable decency for over-the-air broadcast.

From 2006 to April 2009, WKBW operated WNGS, a station owned by Equity Media Holdings, for most of that time under Equity's then-in-house network Retro Television Network. Equity went bankrupt in 2009, selling off RTN to one of its shareholders by January 2009 (which led to WNGS and other Equity stations dropping the network) and the Equity stations being liquidated, with WNGS sold to Daystar Television Network in April 2009 (the station has since been resold to a local group). As a result of the changes, WKBW had dropped all involvement with WNGS. However, WKBW continues to maintain control of the web addresses it registered to that station under their ownership (which all redirect to a 404 error page on the WKBW site), and this forced the station once it came back to the air under local ownership in late 2010 to rebrand under new call letters WBBZ once all operations were up and running.