WCAU
WCAU is a television station in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, serving the Delaware Valley. It is owned and operated by the NBC television network through its NBC Owned Television Stations division.
Under common ownership with Mount Laurel, New Jersey–licensed Telemundo outlet WWSI and regional sports network NBC Sports Philadelphia, both WCAU and WWSI share studios in the Comcast Technology Center on Arch Street in Center City, with some operations remaining at their former main studio at the corner of City Avenue and Monument Road in Bala Cynwyd. The stations broadcast from the same transmitter in the Roxborough section of Philadelphia.
History
As a CBS station (1946–January 1995)
In 1946, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin secured a construction permit for channel 10, naming its proposed station WPEN-TV after the newspaper's WPEN radio stations, now WKDN, and 98.1 FM, later WCAU-FM and now WOGL. The picture changed dramatically in 1947, when The Philadelphia Record folded.The Bulletin inherited the Records "goodwill", along with the rights to buy the radio station WCAU and the original WCAU-FM from their longtime owners, brothers Isaac and Leon Levy. The Bulletin sold the less-powerful WPEN and WCAU-FM, with the latter being renamed WPEN-FM; it is now WMGK. The Bulletin kept its FM station, renaming it WCAU-FM to match its new AM sister. The newspaper also kept its construction permit for channel 10, renaming it WCAU-TV.
WCAU-TV went on the air March 1, 1948, as Philadelphia's third television station with an initial test pattern on Channel 10. It carried its first CBS network show on a "sneak preview" basis on March 3, but the official opening of the station was not until May 23, 1948. It secured an affiliation with CBS through the influence of the Levy brothers, who continued to work for the newspaper as consultants. WCAU radio had been one of CBS' original 16 affiliates when the network launched in 1927. A year later, the Levy brothers persuaded their brother-in-law, William S. Paley, to buy the struggling network. The Levy brothers were shareholders and directors at CBS for many years. Due to this long relationship, channel 10 signed on as CBS's third television affiliate.
In the late 1950s, the Federal Communications Commission collapsed northern Delaware, South Jersey, and the Lehigh Valley into the Philadelphia market. The Bulletin realized that channel 10's original tower, atop the PSFS Building in Center City, was not nearly strong enough to serve this larger viewing area. In 1957, WCAU-TV moved to a new tower in Roxborough, which added most of Delaware, the Jersey Shore and the Lehigh Valley to its city-grade coverage.
Also in 1957, the Bulletin formed a limited partnership with the Megargee family, owner of CBS affiliate WGBI-TV in Scranton. As part of the deal, channel 22's call letters were changed to WDAU-TV. Soon afterward, the FCC ruled that the Bulletin could not keep both stations due to a large signal overlap in the Lehigh Valley. Although the Bulletin had only bought a minority stake in channel 22, the FCC ruled that this stake was so large that the two stations were effectively a duopoly. The Bulletin could not afford to get a waiver to keep both stations, so it opted to keep its stake in WDAU-TV and sell the WCAU stations to CBS. CBS had to seek a waiver to buy the WCAU stations, as the signals of WCAU's AM and television stations overlapped with those of WCBS radio and WCBS-TV in New York City. However, in its application for a waiver, CBS cited NBC's then-ownership of WRCV-TV in Philadelphia and WRCA-TV in New York City. The FCC readily granted the waiver, and CBS took control in 1958.
Switch from CBS to NBC (1994–January 1995)
In July 1994, CBS entered into a long-term affiliation agreement with Westinghouse Broadcasting, owners of Philadelphia's longtime NBC affiliate, KYW-TV, and its sister stations in Baltimore and Boston. Westinghouse converted all three of those stations into CBS affiliates. CBS was reluctant to include KYW-TV in the deal since it had been a very distant third in the Philadelphia ratings for more than a decade. In contrast, WCAU was a solid runner-up to ABC-owned station WPVI-TV. Ultimately, CBS decided to affiliate with channel 3 and sell channel 10, ending a 47-year relationship with the station.NBC and New World Communications then emerged as the leading bidders for WCAU. NBC had wanted to own a station in Philadelphia for many years; for most of the broadcasting era, Philadelphia was the largest market where NBC didn't own a station. It briefly succeeded in 1956, when it extorted Westinghouse into exchanging channel 3 and KYW radio for NBC's Cleveland stations, WTAM-AM-FM and WNBK television. However, after Westinghouse complained, the FCC and the U.S. Justice Department nullified the swap in June 1965. New World got into the bidding because it had just signed a multi-year affiliation deal with Fox, and intended to make WCAU a Fox station had it emerged as channel 10's owner. Fox's affiliate in Philadelphia, WTXF-TV, was about to become an affiliate of the United Paramount Network, which was to be programmed mostly by WTXF's owner, Paramount Stations Group. New World found the chance to give Fox a VHF station in the nation's fourth-largest market too much to resist. Had WCAU become a Fox station, it would have retained its status as the "home" station of the NFL's Philadelphia Eagles. The station had carried Eagles games since 1950, and had carried the majority of Eagles games since CBS won the rights to NFL games in 1956. Indeed, Fox had cut its affiliation deal with New World because it had recently won the rights to the National Football Conference, where the Eagles play; New World owned a large number of CBS affiliates. Fox jumped into the bidding as well in case New World's bid fell through.
However, Viacom, which bought Paramount in mid-1994, opted instead to sell WTXF-TV to Fox, making WTXF-TV a Fox O&O—and hence the new "home" of the Eagles. This led New World to pull out of the bidding war for WCAU as well, effectively handing channel 10 to NBC.
As an NBC-owned station (January 1995–present)
While KYW-TV's sister stations in Boston and Baltimore switched to CBS in January 1995, the swap was delayed in Philadelphia when CBS discovered that an outright sale of channel 10 would have forced it to pay capital gains taxes on the proceeds from the deal. To solve this problem, CBS, NBC and Group W entered into a complex ownership and affiliation deal in November 1994. To make the deal for WCAU an even trade, NBC transferred KCNC-TV in Denver and KUTV in Salt Lake City to CBS in exchange; additionally, the NBC and CBS stations in Miami traded broadcasting facilities, with CBS moving to the stronger of the two signals. CBS then traded controlling interest in KCNC and KUTV to Group W in return for a minority stake in KYW-TV. The deal officially took effect on September 10, 1995. Group W's parent, the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, purchased CBS two months later, making CBS' Philadelphia radio stations sisters to WCAU-AM/WPHT's longtime rival, KYW radio. The last CBS network program to air on channel 10 was a repeat of Walker, Texas Ranger, which began at 10 p.m. on September 9, 1995.Although the radio stations had dropped the WCAU calls some years before, NBC dropped the -TV suffix from channel 10's callsign soon after it assumed control.
In January 2011, the Philadelphia-based cable and media company Comcast acquired a 51% majority stake in WCAU's parent company, by then known as NBC Universal, which effectively makes the station locally owned. Comcast bought the other 49% in early 2013.
In March 2013, NBCUniversal announced that it would buy Telemundo affiliate WWSI from ZGS Communications for $20 million, giving WCAU a duopoly partner, as with several other NBC O&Os. The sale was completed on June 2 of that year. In August 2012, NBC Owned Stations Group rebranded channel 10, to reflect the Look F package.
On February 14, 2014, WCAU, along with nearby NBC affiliate WBAL-TV in Baltimore, began to be shown on Comcast cable systems in the Susquehanna Valley after WGAL, the NBC affiliate in that market, was knocked off the air after a portion of the roof at the station's Columbia Avenue studio facility collapsed due to heavy accumulations of snow and ice caused by a winter storm that moved through the Eastern United States earlier that week.
On April 16, 2014, WMGM-TV, the NBC affiliate in nearby Atlantic City, announced that the station would drop its NBC affiliation and shut down its news operation on January 1, 2015, presumably due to WCAU claiming market exclusivity. Following an hour-long documentary focusing on the station's history and staff entitled NewsCenter 40: The Stories Behind the Station, WMGM-TV then began carrying programs from the Soul of the South network, while WCAU became the sole NBC affiliate in the market. WMGM-TV was sold to Univision Communications in 2017 and is now a primary True Crime Network affiliate; it also relays sister station and Univision network O&O WUVP-DT on its third digital subchannel.
Studios
Channel 10 was originally located at 1622 Chestnut Street in Center City along with its sister radio stations. The building, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983, now houses Institute of Contemporary Art. In 1952, WCAU-AM-FM-TV moved to a new facility in the Main Line suburb of Bala Cynwyd. The studio, located on Monument Road at City Avenue, was a state-of-the-art television center, and the first building in the nation to be constructed specifically for mainly television productions, though WCAU's radio stations were also based out of the facility until the 1995 sale to NBC.On January 16, 2014, it was announced that WCAU and sister station WWSI would move to the then-under-construction Comcast Technology Center on Arch Street in Center City, which was built by NBC parent Comcast. This 59-story building became the tallest building in Philadelphia, and is now recognized as the tallest building in the United States outside of New York and Chicago. After several weeks of off-air tests, WCAU and WWSI officially moved all on-air operations to the new facility on October 21, 2018. However, some technical and other operations, and the base and staging for the station's live news vehicles, will remain in Bala Cynwyd for the time being.