WSES
WSES is a television station licensed to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, United States, serving the western portion of the Birmingham market as an affiliate of the digital multicast network Heroes & Icons. The station is owned by Howard Stirk Holdings, a partner company of the Sinclair Broadcast Group. WSES' advertising sales office is located on Golden Crest Drive in Birmingham, and its transmitter is located near County Road 38/Blue Creek Road, east of State Route 69 near Windham Springs.
WGWW in Anniston operates as a full-time satellite of WSES.
History
As an independent station
The station first signed on the air on October 27, 1965, as WCFT-TV. Originally operating as an independent station, it was the first television station to sign on in western Alabama. It was originally owned by Chapman Family Television, a consortium of eight Tuscaloosa businessmen who saw the benefits of operating a television station to serve west-central Alabama, in terms of both business and community service purposes.However, the station did not return a profit suitable enough for its owners throughout its first two years of operation, an issue that led Chapman Family Television to sell the station to South Mississippi Broadcasting, Inc. in 1967, becoming the company's second television station, after flagship WDAM-TV in the company's home market of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The new owners rejuvenated WCFT by heavily investing in the station, purchasing new broadcasting and transmission equipment, and improving the station's image. In addition to carrying syndicated programming, WCFT-TV also aired network programs from CBS and NBC that were not cleared for broadcast in the Birmingham market by WAPI-TV, which WBMG did during that same timeframe.
As an exclusive CBS affiliate
On May 31, 1970, when WAPI-TV formally removed CBS programming and became the exclusive NBC affiliate for the Birmingham market, WCFT-TV became an exclusive CBS affiliate; WBMG in Birmingham and WHMA-TV in Anniston also became exclusive CBS affiliates, with each serving different portions of central Alabama.Even though Tuscaloosa is southwest of Birmingham, CBS opted to retain its affiliation with WCFT because, at the time, WBMG suffered from a severely weak broadcast signal that did not provide adequate coverage to all of central Alabama. Despite Birmingham's relatively close proximity to the city, the WBMG signal barely covered Tuscaloosa. Even after channel 42 increased its transmitter power to 1.2 million watts in 1969, it provided marginal to non-existent coverage of much of west-central Alabama. As such, many cable providers in the western part of the market opted to carry WCFT rather than WBMG. WCFT regularly trounced WBMG in that portion of the market. Unlike WBMG, channel 33 was fairly competitive with WBRC-TV and WAPI/WVTM, especially with its local newscasts that focused almost exclusively on western Alabama.
Although the area was only served at the time by WCFT and Alabama Public Television satellite station WIIQ in Demopolis, Arbitron decided to break off Tuscaloosa into its own separate television market in 1977, placing it at a ranking below #170. On January 1, 1978, Service Broadcasters sold WDAM and WCFT to Beam Communications. On August 20, 1990, Beacon sold WCFT and WDAM to Federal Broadcasting.
As a satellite of WBMA-LP/-LD
On May 5, 1994, Great American Communications agreed to sell WBRC and three of its sister stations—fellow ABC affiliate WGHP in High Point, North Carolina, NBC affiliate WDAF-TV in Kansas City and CBS affiliate KSAZ-TV in Phoenix—to New World Communications for $350 million in cash and $10 million in share warrants. As part of a broader deal between New World and the Fox Broadcasting Company signed on May 23 of that year, New World agreed to affiliate five of its eight existing television stations and the four it had acquired from Great American with Fox, in a series of affiliation transactions that would take two years to complete due to the varying conclusion dates of their ongoing contracts with either ABC, NBC or CBS. Three weeks later, New World agreed to buy WVTM-TV and three other stations—CBS affiliates KDFW in Dallas–Fort Worth and KTBC in Austin, and ABC affiliate KTVI in St. Louis—from Argyle Television Holdings, in a purchase option-structured deal worth $717 million. Due to conflicts with FCC ownership rules of the time period, New World subsequently decided to establish and transfer the licenses of WBRC and WGHP into a trust company, with the intent to sell them to the Fox network's broadcasting subsidiary, Fox Television Stations.Although the sales of WBRC and WGHP were finalized on July 24, 1995, Fox Television Stations could not switch WBRC's network affiliation in the short term, as the station's contract with ABC would not expire until August 31, 1996. While this forced Fox to operate WBRC as an ABC affiliate for thirteen months after the sale's closure, it gave the latter network enough time to find a new central Alabama affiliate. ABC first approached WTTO —which, along with semi-satellites WDBB in Tuscaloosa and WNAL-TV in Gadsden, was set to lose its Fox affiliation to channel 6—for a deal to replace WBRC as its Birmingham outlet. However, the owner of WTTO, Sinclair Broadcast Group, only expressed interest in carrying ABC's prime time and news programming. It also refused to launch a news department for WTTO, as the group did not factor local news production into its corporate budget at the time.
In November 1995, Allbritton Communications purchased WCFT from Federal Broadcasting for $20 million; it concurrently signed a deal with Fant Broadcasting to assume operational responsibilities for WNAL-TV under a local marketing agreement. Then in January 1996, after it terminated the WNAL deal, Allbritton acquired the non-license assets of CBS affiliate WJSU-TV in Anniston from Osborne Communications Corporation for $12 million. Allbritton wanted to relocate WJSU's transmitter facilities closer to Birmingham to provide a stronger signal within that metropolitan area and nearby Tuscaloosa; however, the relocation was prohibited under FCC regulations that required a station's transmitter site be located no more than from its city of license, which would have required an application to change the city of license closer to Birmingham in order to legally allow the move.
Shortly after the WJSU purchase took place, ABC reached a unique deal with Allbritton, in which WCFT and WJSU would become the new ABC affiliates for Central Alabama, with WCFT acting as the main station. ABC had a very strong relationship with Allbritton, particularly as Allbritton's flagship station, WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C., had long been one of ABC's highest-rated affiliates. In April 1996, a few months after the Birmingham deal was struck, Allbritton's ties to ABC were sealed wholesale when Allbritton reached a ten-year affiliation agreement with ABC that renewed contracts with the group's four existing ABC affiliates and resulted in two of its other stations switching to the network, the latter of which would become a satellite of WJXX in nearby Jacksonville, Florida, when Allbritton signed that station on in February 1997).
However, under Nielsen rules, neither WCFT nor WJSU would have likely been counted in the Birmingham ratings books as it had designated Tuscaloosa and Anniston as separate markets at the time. Allbritton's solution to this issue was to purchase W58CK, a low-power independent station in Birmingham that began operations on November 18, 1994, which would serve as the primary station for the purpose of being counted in local ratings diaries. While the purchase of channel 58 was not a condition of the deal between ABC and Allbritton, it did pave the way for Anniston and Tuscaloosa to be consolidated back into the Birmingham television market in September 1998. That move benefited all of the major Birmingham stations, as it not only increased their viewership in Tuscaloosa and Anniston, but also resulted in Birmingham's placement in Nielsen's national market rankings jumping twelve spots from 51st to 39th place.
On September 1, 1996, when W58CK became an ABC affiliate, WCFT and WJSU concurrently ended separate operations as well and became full-powered satellite stations of W58CK, with Allbritton assuming control of WJSU's operations under the originally proposed LMA, which was transferred to Flagship Broadcasting upon that company's purchase of that station. WCFT's studio facilities near Skyland Boulevard in Tuscaloosa were converted into the Tuscaloosa news bureau for W58CK's news department; its master control operations were migrated into W58CK's new studios on Concourse Parkway in Hoover. WCFT and WJSU also ceded the CBS programming rights in central Alabama to WBMG, which had recently upgraded its transmitter to provide a much stronger full-power signal throughout much of the Birmingham market, and WNAL-TV, which took over as CBS's northeastern Alabama affiliate on the day of the WBRC/WBMA+/WTTO switch.
Even though WBMA was the official ABC affiliate for the Birmingham market, Allbritton chose instead to name the triumvirate operation "ABC 33/40", using the over-the-air channel numbers of WCFT and WJSU instead as the collective branding for the stations, making it appear as if WCFT was the primary station and WJSU was acting as its satellite. In the case of WCFT, its signal footprint covered the western portions of the Birmingham metropolitan area and outlying rural areas of western Jefferson County, stretching westward to Columbus, Mississippi ; the station's broadcast signal provided a contour of at least Grade B coverage within Birmingham's western inner ring. Cable providers within west-central Alabama received WBMA's programming through WCFT.
Acquisition by Sinclair
For over a decade and a half, WBMA+ maintained a strong relationship with Allbritton, with no major problems arising between the two entities and, likewise, no major changes occurring to the station's operations. On July 29, 2013, Allbritton announced that it would sell its seven television stations, including WBMA+, to the Sinclair Broadcast Group, in an attempt by the company to shift its focus toward co-owned political news website, Politico. As part of the deal, Sinclair had intended to sell the license assets of its existing Birmingham stations, CW affiliate WTTO and MyNetworkTV affiliate WABM to Deerfield Media, and retain operational responsibilities for those stations through shared services and joint sales agreements. At the time, no affiliation changes were expected.On December 6, 2013, the FCC informed Sinclair that applications related to the deal need to be "amended or withdrawn", as Sinclair would retain an existing time brokerage agreement between WTTO and its satellite station, WDBB ; this would, in effect, create a new LMA between WBMA+ and WDBB, even though the commission had ruled in 1999 that such agreements made after November 5, 1996, covering the programming of more than 15 percent of a station's broadcast day would count toward the ownership limits for the brokering station's owner. A sale of WBMA and its satellites to a separate buyer was also not an option for Sinclair, as Allbritton wanted its stations to be sold together to limit the tax rate that the company would have had to pay from the accrued proceeds, which it estimated would have been substantially higher if the group was sold piecemeal.
On March 20, 2014, as part of a restructuring of the Sinclair-Allbritton deal in order to address these ownership conflicts as well as to expedite the Allbritton acquisition because of them due to the FCC's increased scrutiny of outsourcing agreements used to circumvent in-market ownership caps, Sinclair announced that it would retain ownership of WTTO, and form a new duopoly between it and WBMA+; WABM was to be sold to a third-party buyer with which Sinclair would not enter into an operational outsourcing arrangement or maintain any contingent interest, other than a possible transitional shared facilities agreement until WTTO was able to move its operations from its longtime home on Beacon Parkway West to WBMA's facility in Hoover.
On May 29, 2014, however, Sinclair informed the FCC that it had not found a buyer for WABM and proposed surrendering the licenses of WCFT and WJSU to the agency. Under the restructured plan, WBMA's programming would be added to WABM's main channel, which would result in the latter's syndicated and MyNetworkTV programming moving to its second digital channel on 68.2. Sinclair opted to retain WABM on the basis that its transmission facilities were superior to those of WCFT and WJSU; indeed, moving ABC programming to WABM would give ABC a full-power affiliate in Birmingham itself for the first time since 1996. After nearly a year of delays, Sinclair's deal to acquire Allbritton was approved by the FCC on July 24, 2014, and was completed on August 1, 2014.