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WLNE-TV, channel 6, is an ABC-affiliated television station licensed to New Bedford, Massachusetts, USA and serving the Providence, Rhode Island television market. WLNE is owned by Bronxville, New York-based Citadel Communications (unrelated to the former Citadel Broadcasting Corporation, which owned several stations in the Providence market before being acquired by Cumulus Media in 2011), and has its studios and offices located in the Orms Building in downtown Providence; its transmitter is based in Rehoboth, Massachusetts. ==History== The station began broadcasting on January 1, 1963 as WTEV from studios on 430 County Street in New Bedford.〔http://menujoy.com/wtev/〕 and transmitter located in Little Compton, Rhode Island, with the antenna mounted on a tower; a few years later, WTEV moved to a tower in Tiverton. The Tiverton transmitter was still 20 miles away from the transmitter sites in Rehoboth used by the existing stations in the Providence market, WJAR-TV (channel 10) and WPRO-TV (channel 12, now WPRI-TV). However, WTEV could not build a tower in Rehoboth due to the risk of interference with WRGB in Schenectady, New York and WCSH-TV in Portland, Maine, which also broadcast on channel 6 in the analog era. Before cable arrived in Rhode Island in the early 1970s, viewers experienced reception problems with WTEV. This was because for its first four decades on the air, its transmitter was located in Newport County, resulting in its signal being sent from a different direction than WJAR-TV and WPRO/WPRI. This forced viewers to mount their outdoor antennas on rotators to get a passable signal from the station. Signal issues associated with channel 6 would be an incurable problem for the station for 45 years. ABC had a curious history in Rhode Island prior to WTEV's sign-on. In the earliest years of television in Providence, all four networks (including DuMont) were shoehorned on primary NBC affiliate WJAR-TV, at that time the market's only television station (WJAR carried about half of NBC's and CBS's programming, but very few ABC or DuMont shows). WNET launched on channel 16 in 1953 as an ABC affiliate. However, it was forced off the air in 1956 due to the difficulties faced by UHF startups at the time. Since television manufacturers weren't required to include UHF tuning capability on television sets, viewers needed an expensive converter (or an all-channel set, the latter being very rare at the time) to watch WNET, and the picture was marginal at best even with one. For the seven years prior to channel 6's sign-on, WJAR and CBS affiliate WPRO-TV cherry-picked ABC programming, usually airing it in off-hours but occasionally pre-empting their primary network's schedule. However, much of Rhode Island could get the full ABC schedule from Boston stations—WHDH-TV (channel 5, now occupied by WCVB-TV) prior to January 1, 1961, and WNAC-TV (channel 7, the present-day WHDH) from 1961 to 1963. Even though Providence was big enough to support three full network affiliates, it soon became apparent that channel 16 would not be resurrected in the near future (prior to 1964, television sets were not required to have UHF tuning capability, and most didn't). The owners of the future WTEV decided to seek a waiver of FCC technical regulations to allow VHF channel 6 to be added to the FCC's ''Table of Allocations''.〔http://www.fcc.gov/spectrum〕 The channel 6 license had originally been allocated to the island of Nantucket on Cape Cod. However, FCC filings argued that it wasn't practical to operate television studios and offices from Nantucket (at the time FCC rules required that a station have its studios and offices located in its community of license). Since a channel 6 allocation in the Providence area would have been short-spaced to WCSH-TV and WRGB, the FCC allocation was modified to New Bedford—the nearest city on the Massachusetts side of the market where a transmitter could be built that could decently cover Providence while protecting WCSH-TV and WRGB from interference. New Bedford and Bristol County are part of the Rhode Island market due to Rhode Island's small geographic size, even though the rest of southern Massachusetts is in the Boston market (counties were assigned by Arbitron and Nielsen to a particular television market based upon their viewing patterns). The advent of satellite television made this an irritation to some Massachusetts subscribers of services such as DirecTV and Dish Network who are unable to receive Massachusetts news and sports from Boston stations. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allows network affiliates to prevent satellite subscribers from receiving network stations from outside the station's designated market. Bristol County is the only part of Massachusetts associated with Rhode Island for television purposes. WTEV was founded by a group that was 55-percent owned by E. Anthony and Sons, publisher of the New Bedford ''Standard-Times'' and owner of WNBH radio (1340 AM and 98.1 FM, now WCTK); the remaining 45 percent was held by New England Television, the holder of the license for the old WNET. In 1966, shortly after E. Anthony and Sons sold the ''Standard-Times'' and WNBH, WTEV was purchased by Steinman Stations of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. WTEV moderately preempted ABC shows, in most every case a low-rated program. This didn't pose as much of a problem as it may seem, since most viewers could still get the full schedule from Boston's WNAC until 1972, and on WCVB afterward. During afternoon hours, WTEV ran a blend of cartoons and classic sitcoms. Late nights were devoted to movies. 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「WLNE-TV」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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