WSBK-TV
WSBK-TV is an independent television station in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is owned by the CBS News and Stations group alongside CBS outlet WBZ-TV. The two stations share studios on Soldiers Field Road in the Allston–Brighton section of Boston. WSBK-TV's transmitter is located on Cedar Street in Needham, Massachusetts, on a tower site that was formerly owned by CBS and is now owned by American Tower Corporation.
WSBK is also available via satellite throughout the United States on Dish Network as part of its superstation package. Otherwise, it enjoys cable coverage throughout much of the New England region, though this has been limited compared to the past when it was more widely distributed.
History
Origins (1955–1966)
The first construction permit for channel 38 in Boston was granted in October 1955 to Ajax Enterprises, headed by Herbert Mayer, a former New York City attorney who had founded Empire Coil, a New Rochelle, New York–based manufacturer of RF coils for television stations and receivers. Mayer went on to own stations in Portland, Oregon, and Cleveland. He sold the cable manufacturer and both television stations to Storer Broadcasting in 1954. Channel 38 was originally slated to have the call sign WHMB; however, after Storer changed the call letters of the Cleveland property to WJW-TV in April 1956, Mayer quickly reclaimed WXEL for the Boston station. WXEL's proposed transmitter in Melrose was never built, and the Federal Communications Commission revoked the construction permit and deleted the call sign in November 1960.The current station signed on the air on October 12, 1964. It was first licensed to the Boston Catholic Television Center under the call letters WIHS-TV, with the call letters standing for the "IHS" initialism for the Christogram. The station employed a general entertainment format, along with broadcasts of the daily and Sunday Mass. As WIHS, the station initially programmed a "hybrid" schedule—educational and religious programs during the morning, and syndicated programs and movies in the afternoon and evening. The station also carried two 15-minute local newscasts each weekday, at 5:45 and 10 pm, which consisted of an announcer reading news headlines into a camera.
The station also made an initial foray into sports, carrying ten regular season away games and all playoff road games from the Boston Celtics that were not carried on network television during the 1964–65 season. However, team management was worried about the lack of penetration of the UHF band, leading to playoff away games being simulcast on WHDH-TV in 1965 ; the following season, the team moved back to WHDH outright. Some college sports were carried during the WIHS era, which were carried over during the early Storer Broadcasting years.
WSBK-TV (1966–present)
The station was purchased by Storer Broadcasting in 1966. A few months after the purchase, the station's call sign was changed to the present WSBK-TV, named after the company's ticker symbol on the New York Stock Exchange, "SBK". Storer scored its biggest coup in 1967, when it secured broadcast rights to the Boston Bruins from WKBG-TV, and eventually owned the team for a three-year period from 1972 to 1975. During the next few years, as the Bruins became a contender for the National Hockey League's Stanley Cup championship, the popularity of these games led to a spike in UHF antenna purchases, and helped make channel 38 one of the leading independent stations in the country. For much of the time between 1970 and 1984, WSBK would televise between 70 and 72 of the Bruins' 80 regular season games, as well as all playoff games not shown on network television.In 1975, WSBK acquired television rights to the Boston Red Sox; during the team's first year on channel 38, the Red Sox won the American League pennant. The team remained on WSBK until 1995, and returned for another three-year period from 2003 to 2005. WSBK had broadcast between 90 and 110 Red Sox games a year between 1975 and 1983; about 75 games a year from 1984 to 1995, and a limited number of games between 2003 and 2005. Although WSBK carried Celtics road playoff games in 1969, the station would not carry the NBA team's games on a regular basis until 1993. During that time, WSBK broadcast road games of the Celtics; it continued to do so through 1998.
In addition to an increasingly stronger lineup of syndicated programs—which during the late 1960s through the 1990s included cartoons and sitcoms, WSBK continued to run some network programs that were preempted by the local NBC, ABC, and CBS affiliates until 1981. The station also ran several movies a day. During the 1970s through the mid-1980s, WSBK's cartoon programs were hosted by Willie Whistle, a clown who used a bird-whistle in his mouth to create a distinctive voice he was recognized for.
Becoming a superstation
WSBK's popularity was such that by the mid-1970s, it was available on nearly every cable provider in New England and as far west as Buffalo, New York, and as far south as Long Island. In the late 1980s, WSBK became a national superstation when it entered into an agreement with Eastern Microwave to distribute its signal outside of New England. Eastern Microwave also distributed the signal of existing superstation WOR-TV in New York City. WSBK's main selling point was its coverage of the Red Sox, similar to how WOR-TV, WGN-TV in Chicago, and WTBS in Atlanta respectively used their coverage of the New York Mets, Chicago Cubs and White Sox, and Atlanta Braves. WSBK's carriage did not reach the same level as the other stations, but covered large portions of New York, and a handful of cable providers in Florida. WSBK's coverage of the Boston Bruins also made it a favorite superstation on Canadian cable providers, along with WOR.When the FCC's syndication exclusivity rules were strengthened in the early 1990s, distribution of all out-of-market station signals were hampered. The rule protected stations in local markets from out-of-market competition by superstations that aired identical syndicated programming. Any station could file with cable providers for "protection" and the provider would have to black out the offending station for periods of time. The management of this "blocking" would prove so cumbersome that many cable providers began dropping distant signals such as WSBK and effectively stopped most superstation distribution. Distributors such as Eastern Microwave attempted to make it easier for cable providers by substituting shows that could not be blocked, but the damage had already been done by then.
WSBK began operating on a 24-hour schedule in the late 1970s, only to revert to late-night signoffs by the early 1980s. Besides its status as a sports powerhouse, WSBK made a name for itself when it created The Movie Loft, one of the first "hosted movie" franchises on television, long before it became a staple on cable. The program aired syndicated movies with interstitial program elements hosted by Dana Hersey. Part of the program's marketing was that it aired only "unedited" movies. The Movie Loft tested that on several occasions airing movies such as The Deer Hunter, The Boys in the Band and 48 Hrs. without editing for inappropriate content or length. In the mid-1980s, WSBK dropped the midday movie to make room for more sitcoms. For a few years, WSBK signed off at 1 a.m. or 2 am, but began operating 24 hours a day by the end of the decade. Although it was one of the strongest independent stations in the nation, WSBK turned down an offer to affiliate with the upstart Fox network in 1986. This may have been because most of the markets in channel 38's cable footprint had enough stations to provide Fox affiliates at the outset, making the prospect of WSBK as a multistate Fox affiliate unattractive to Storer/KKR. The Fox affiliation for the market went to WFXT in 1987 after News Corp. acquired the station from CBN.
Kohlberg Kravis Roberts bought WSBK and most of Storer's other stations in 1985. At this time, ownership was officially under the KKR subsidiary of New Boston Television, although Storer was still referenced on-air as being the parent company of WSBK. KKR later sold most of its stations to Gillett Communications. When Gillett defaulted on some of the financing agreements in the early 1990s, the ownership was restructured and the company was renamed SCI Television. Eventually, SCI ran into fiscal issues, and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1993. As a result, WSBK was sold in a group deal to New World Communications that year.
Sale to Paramount and affiliation with UPN (1995–2006)
In 1994, New World made a landmark deal with Fox to switch most of its CBS-, ABC-, and NBC-affiliated stations to Fox. WSBK remained an independent station and was eventually put up for sale again to protect existing affiliate WFXT, which Fox would acquire soon afterward. Channel 38 was then sold to the Paramount Stations Group, controlled by Paramount Pictures and became a charter affiliate of the United Paramount Network on January 16, 1995; that June, the longtime "TV 38" branding was retired and changed to "UPN 38". In 1996, Viacom acquired a 50% ownership stake in the network from Chris-Craft Industries, which effectively made WSBK-TV a UPN owned-and-operated station.Originally, WSBK continued to essentially program under the conventions of an independent station as UPN would not run five nights a week of programming until 1998. While the affiliation did not result in immediate changes to the rest of its lineup outside of prime time, WSBK began incorporating more talk and reality shows by 1997, with older shows being gradually phased out. The Movie Loft was discontinued as a result of host Dana Hersey's retirement, as well as declining ratings for the program as the movie packages that the station acquired were of a lesser quality than in previous years. WSBK later revived the genre with The UPN 38 Movie House, hosted by actor and comedian Brian Frates and Movie Night ; in the early 2000s, it also attempted a revival of The Movie Loft hosted by Skip Kelly. The station also began to decrease its telecasts of local professional sports events. For some time after affiliating with UPN, WSBK continued to air primarily cartoons and classic sitcoms. In late 1999, WSBK was lowered to only a morning cartoon block, a major amount of talk and reality shows during the midday and afternoon hours, and more recent sitcoms in the evening along with UPN shows. The station stopped carrying cartoons in 2003, around the same time that UPN discontinued the Disney's One Too block. By 2002, the station was running a blend of talk shows, court shows, and reality shows from 9 a.m. through the late afternoon, with recent off-network sitcoms continuing in the evenings. Movies were also cut back, and were generally relegated to weekends only. However, one tradition that remained on WSBK was the Sunday morning run of The Three Stooges.
In 2000, after Viacom merged with the previous CBS Corporation—which created a duopoly with WBZ-TV, WSBK moved out of its longtime home on Leo Birmingham Parkway in Brighton and integrated its operations into WBZ-TV's facility nearby. The former WSBK studio facility is now occupied by four Boston radio stations that, until 2017, were owned by former corporate sibling CBS Radio. Under CBS, WSBK began sharing some first-run syndicated programs with WBZ-TV. In 2001, WSBK became the Boston home for the game shows Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy!—unusual for a UPN or independent station. In 2009, both shows moved to WBZ-TV, swapping stations with The Insider and Entertainment Tonight, with management citing the game shows' older-skewing demographics as more closely fitting WBZ, and the younger audiences for the entertainment news programs more closely fitting WSBK.