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WBTV, virtual channel 3 (UHF digital channel 23), is a CBS-affiliated television station located in Charlotte, North Carolina, United States. WBTV is one of two flagship stations of owner Raycom Media (the other being WSFA in the company's homebase of Montgomery, Alabama). The station maintains studio facilities located off Morehead Street, just west of Uptown Charlotte, and its transmitter in north-central Gaston County. ==History== The station first signed on the air on July 15, 1949. When it debuted, WBTV was the 13th television station in the United States and the first in the Carolinas; it is currently the oldest television station located between Richmond and Atlanta. Veteran Charlotte broadcaster Jim Patterson was the first person seen on the station, and remained employed there until his death in 1986. WBTV was originally owned by the Greensboro, North Carolina-based Jefferson Standard Insurance Company, owners of WBT (1110 AM), the city's oldest radio station and the first fully licensed station in the South. Jefferson Standard had purchased WBT from CBS in 1947. Shortly before the television station went on the air, its call letters were modified from WBT-TV to WBTV. Jefferson Standard merged with Pilot Life in 1968 (although it had owned controlling interest since 1945) and became Jefferson-Pilot Corporation. In 1970, the media interests were folded into a new subsidiary, Jefferson-Pilot Communications. WBTV received one of the last construction permits issued before the Federal Communications Commission's "freeze" on new television licenses, which lasted until the Commission released its ''Sixth Report and Order'' in 1952. As such, it was Charlotte's only VHF station for eight years, carrying affiliations with all four major networks of the time – CBS, NBC, ABC and DuMont. However, WBTV has always been a primary CBS affiliate, owing to WBT radio's long affiliation with the CBS Radio Network. It is the only commercial television station in the market that has never changed its primary affiliation. Channel 3 had originally operated from a converted radio studio in the Wilder Building, alongside its sister radio station. In 1955, WBT and WBTV moved to a then state-of-the-art facility on a hill atop Morehead Street, where both stations are still based today. The studio address, One Julian Price Place, is named in honor of a longtime Jefferson Standard/Jefferson-Pilot executive. WBTV's only competition in its early years came from a UHF station on channel 36, known as WAYS-TV and then WQMC-TV, which broadcast briefly from 1953 to 1955. It was nominally an NBC affiliate, sharing a secondary ABC affiliation with channel 3. However, channel 36's signal was severely weak, and NBC continued to allow WBTV to cherry-pick its stronger programming. Channel 36 went dark in March 1955, and DuMont shut down roughly a year later in August 1956. The three remaining networks continued to have some of their programming shoehorned on channel 3 for over a year until Charlotte's second VHF station, WSOC-TV (channel 9), took the NBC affiliation when it signed on in April 1957. Channel 36 returned to the air in November 1964 as WCCB (later moving to channel 18 in November 1966), carrying certain CBS programs that WBTV turned down in order to carry ABC programs. ABC programming continued to be split among the three stations until 1967, when WCCB became a full-time ABC affiliate. From 1958 to 1974, WBTV's studio facilities served as the home for Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling telecasts. Since its completion in 1984, WBTV's signal has been transmitted from a high guy-wired aerial mast transmitter tower located in north-central Gaston County, North Carolina, which is also shared with former radio sister WLNK. When WAGA-TV in Atlanta, which signed on the air four months before WBTV, switched to Fox in December 1994, WBTV became the longest-tenured CBS affiliate located south of Washington, D.C. WFMY-TV in Greensboro, the second-oldest station in the Carolinas, is the network's second-longest tenured affiliate south of the capital; it signed on three months after WBTV. Two years later, after KPIX-TV in San Francisco became a CBS owned-and-operated station (due to owner Westinghouse Electric Corporation's merger with CBS), WBTV became the second longest-tenured affiliate that was not owned by the network, behind only Washington's WUSA. Over the years, Jefferson Standard/Jefferson-Pilot acquired several other radio and television stations across the country, with WBTV serving as the company's flagship station. In 2006, Jefferson-Pilot merged with the Philadelphia-based Lincoln National Corporation. Lincoln Financial retained Jefferson-Pilot's broadcasting division, which was renamed Lincoln Financial Media, with WBTV retaining its status as the flagship station.〔()〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「WBTV」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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