WCCB


WCCB is an independent television station in Charlotte, North Carolina, United States. It serves as the flagship station of locally based Bahakel Communications. WCCB's studios are located just outside Uptown Charlotte, off Independence Boulevard, and its transmitter is located in Newell, an unincorporated area of Mecklenburg County just northeast of the Charlotte city limits.

History

Beginnings

WCCB traces its roots to WAYS-TV, which signed on the air on January 5, 1954, as Charlotte's second television station. It was a primary ABC affiliate with a secondary NBC affiliation. Broadcasting on UHF channel 36, it was North Carolina's second UHF station. It was owned by George Dowdy and his company, Inter-City Advertising, owners of WAYS radio ; Inter-City had filed for channel 11 prior to the 1948 TV freeze, amended its application to specify channel 9 in 1952, then sought channel 36 instead to avoid a comparative hearing. Hugh Deadwyler became co-owner of the station later that year and acquired the station outright after buying Inter-City's interest in 1955; it sold for $4 and the assumption of liabilities. With the sale, WAYS-TV became WQMC.
Channel 36 had a very weak 132,000-watt signal which was spotty further than from the transmitter, making it virtually unviewable even in some parts of Mecklenburg County. Even then, like most UHF stations, it was only viewable on most sets with an expensive UHF converter, and picture quality was marginal at best. Television set manufacturers were not required to include UHF tuners at the time; this would not change until Congress passed the All-Channel Receiver Act in 1964. As a result, it made almost no headway against CBS affiliate WBTV, which continued to cherry-pick certain NBC programs.
The station went dark on March 15, 1955, in what was intended to be a temporary hiatus while it underwent technical improvements, including the construction of a more powerful transmitter at a new location. However, Deadwyler was unable to get the station back on track. In March 1956, Inter-City Advertising sued to place channel 36 into receivership. Inter-City claimed that Deadwyler had not paid any of the $86,220 debt to Radio Corporation of America that was transferred to him and for which RCA was seeking payment from Inter-City.

WUTV

Deadwyler organized Century Advertising Co., Inc., which planned to relaunch channel 36 in 1957 as ABC affiliate WUTV, with a more powerful signal than its predecessor. However, these plans were derailed when Charlotte's second VHF station, WSOC-TV, signed on the air that April as an NBC affiliate. Even with the stronger signal, WUTV would have still been all but unviewable in most of the market. In addition, most of the market got a fairly decent signal from WLOS-TV out of Asheville; which was included in the Charlotte television listings for many years and even ran ads for its programs in Charlotte area newspapers.
After four years of delays, Century Advertising relaunched WUTV on September 5, 1961. The station broadcast non-commercial educational programming from the University of North Carolina and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, though it retained a commercial license. A full new facility was constructed behind the Charlotte Coliseum at 1 Television Place—still home to WCCB today—including a new transmitter site. WUTV's effective radiated power was 206kW visual. In the meantime, Century pursued the allocation of VHF channel 6 to Charlotte.
WUTV, however, was not capable of live programming. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg School Board began to pursue the construction of a full educational TV station on reserved channel 42, buying the equipment of a failed station in Fort Pierce, Florida. While channel 36 might have remained on air until the school board was ready to launch WTVI, Century Advertising decided to ask the educational groups to pay rent in early 1963 after having initially verbally agreed to a three-year rent-free contract. They opted to pay to finish out the 1962–1963 school year but no further, causing WUTV to go silent on May 16, 1963.

Relaunch

In June 1964, businessman Cy Bahakel—who moved from Roanoke, Virginia, to Charlotte—bought the dormant channel 36 license and facilities from Century for $175,000. An addition would be made to the studio building as part of Bahakel's efforts to return the station to the air.
Bahakel returned the station to air on November 1 of that year as WCCB-TV. The call letters had recently been used by what is now WNCF in Montgomery, Alabama, which was acquired by Bahakel earlier that year. Logically, it should have returned as a full-time ABC affiliate. Charlotte had only two network-affiliated stations, CBS affiliate WBTV and NBC affiliate WSOC-TV. On paper, Charlotte had been large enough to support three full network affiliates since the 1950s. However, WCCB's signal, like its predecessor, was nowhere near adequate for a market that stretched from the Sandhills in the east to the High Country in the west. Its signal only operated at 200,000 watts, essentially limiting its coverage area to Charlotte proper and its inner suburbs. Additionally, the FCC had only begun requiring television sets to have all-channel tuning a few months before, and most Charlotte households did not yet have UHF-capable sets. Under the circumstances, ABC decided to retain its secondary affiliation agreements with WBTV and WSOC. WCCB was forced to settle for a secondary affiliation with all three networks, airing most of the network shows that WBTV and WSOC chose to turn down. As of March 1965, the nine-county area had 42,887 homes with UHF, with the number increasing by 3,000 per month. Bahakel said this "exceeds our expectation". For the next three years, WCCB split most of NBC and ABC's programming roughly equally with WSOC. It also picked up some CBS shows from WBTV, which still cleared a few ABC shows.
On November 1, 1966, WCCB moved from channel 36 to channel 18, broadcasting from a new tower located on Newell Hickory Grove Road in northeast Charlotte. The new channel 18 facility was capable of 1.35 million watts of power, giving WCCB a coverage area comparable to those of WBTV and WSOC-TV. In 1967, WSOC-TV dropped all ABC programming and became a full-time NBC affiliate, leaving WCCB-TV to be the exclusive ABC affiliate. It took Charlotte 18 years to finally gain full service from all three major networks of the time. The state's largest market thus got a full-fledged ABC affiliate after the state's two smallest markets, Greenville–New Bern–Washington and Wilmington, received ABC affiliates of their own. However, despite the stronger signal and the first consistent airing of all network programs in Charlotte TV history, WCCB-TV remained a distant third in the ratings.
In 1977, ABC announced that it had lured away WSOC-TV to be its new outlet in the Charlotte market beginning July 1, 1978, replacing WCCB. That decision set off a two-station showdown between WCCB and nine-year-old independent WRET-TV for the NBC affiliation in Charlotte. WCCB was initially seen as the favorite. Unlike WRET, it had a news department. Sources at NBC were said to see channel 36 as their last option, behind WCCB, with its stronger signal, and long-dominant WBTV, which the network was trying to woo from CBS to no avail.
However, WRET owner Ted Turner promised NBC officials that he would spend $2.5 million on station improvements if the network affiliated with channel 36. Of that total, $1 million would go toward starting a news department within one year. The proposed news department would employ 22 people, almost double the size of WCCB's 12-person news operation and almost as large as WSOC's 22-person department. On April 29, news broke that WRET-TV had been selected for the NBC affiliation, with the network preferring it to WCCB based on Turner's record of turning around the station and his ownership of the Atlanta Braves and Atlanta Hawks.
With the decision, WCCB became an independent station. It bought a large chunk of syndicated programming from WRET, including cartoons and older sitcoms. For a time in the late 1970s and early 1980s, after-school cartoons were hosted by the costumed Sonic Man space alien character, played by Larry Sprinkle, who has been a staple in Charlotte radio and television, including serving as a weather anchor for channel 36 since the 1980s. WCCB carried on for almost a decade as a typical UHF general entertainment independent station.

Fox affiliation

In 1986, WCCB became the last station in a top-50 market to join Fox as one of the upstart network's charter affiliates, since it was doing so well in the ratings as an independent. WCCB affiliated with the network when it launched on October 6 of that year. For most of the next quarter-century, WCCB was one of the strongest Fox stations in the country – even claiming to be the highest-rated Fox affiliate in the nation during the 2008–09 television season. The station reaped a major windfall after the NFL moved its National Football Conference television package from CBS to Fox in 1994. By coincidence, this made WCCB the unofficial "home" station of the Carolina Panthers upon the team's 1995 inception. WCCB carried most Panthers regular season games during the team's first 18 seasons, and later acquired the local rights to the team's preseason games from WBTV. Panthers games had generally been the most-watched programs in the market during the NFL football season. After having branded itself as "TV18" since sign-on, WCCB changed its branding to "Fox 18" in 1988 and then to "Fox Charlotte" in 2002.
Cy Bahakel was an original partner in the NBA's Charlotte Hornets, and WCCB served as the team's flagship station for the Hornets' first four seasons in Charlotte from 1988 to 1992. Bahakel owned WCCB until his death on April 20, 2006, with his family taking over the duties of running the station since that point. In 2007, WCCB's website switched to Fox Interactive Media's "MyFox" platform, with the domain transitioning from foxcharlotte.tv to myfoxcharlotte.com; however, the station de-emphasized the "MyFox" corporate reference within a year, with the URL becoming known simply as foxcharlotte.com. The revamped page continued to use the "MyFox" webpage template until 2010, when Broadcast Interactive Media became WCCB's site host.