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WVTM-TV, channel 13, is an NBC-affiliated television station located in Birmingham, Alabama, USA, owned by Hearst Television, a subsidiary of Hearst Corporation.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.almediapage.info/ )〕 WVTM maintains studio and transmitter facilities located atop Red Mountain, next to the studios of Fox affiliate WBRC. ==History== The station first signed on the air on May 29, 1949 as WAFM-TV; it was originally owned by The Voice of Alabama, Inc., along with radio stations WAPI (1070 AM), and WAFM (then at 93.3, now at 94.5 FM as WJOX-FM). It is Alabama's oldest television station. The station originally operated as a primary CBS affiliate with a secondary ABC affiliation. In July 1953, the ''Birmingham News'' bought the Voice of Alabama and changed the station's call letters to WABT (for Alabama's Best Television). The following year, WABT swapped primary affiliations with WBRC-TV (channel 6) and joined NBC, retaining a secondary affiliation with ABC. On January 26, 1956, the Newhouse newspaper chain bought the ''News.'' The station changed its callsign again in 1958 to WAPI-TV (for Alabama Polytechnic Institute, which owned WAPI radio from 1925 to 1932) to match its sister radio stations. WBRC-TV became a full-time ABC affiliate in 1961, forcing WAPI-TV to shoehorn both NBC and CBS programs onto its schedule. This was rather unusual, since in most two-station markets ABC was typically relegated to secondary status on either one or both of the existing stations. The Birmingham market is a fairly large market geographically, stretching across nearly the entire width of the state. It also has some areas of fairly rugged terrain. Both of these factors made prospective station owners skittish about putting one of the available UHF allocations on the air, even though Birmingham was big enough even then to support three full network affiliates. Although there were two other VHF channels in the market, they had both been allocated to Alabama Educational Television. While channel 13 tried to carry the most popular NBC and CBS shows, a lot of fairly popular shows did not air in the Birmingham area because of this arrangement. One of the more popular CBS shows that WAPI-TV did not carry was ''The Ed Sullivan Show'', which resulted in Central Alabama viewers missing The Beatles' American debut unless they were lucky enough to pick up stations in Atlanta, Huntsville or Montgomery. Curiously, one of the NBC shows that channel 13 turned down was ''The Tonight Show.'' WAPI-TV strongly favored NBC for news, so when CBS and NBC expanded their news programs to 30 minutes in 1963, the ''CBS Evening News'' with Walter Cronkite did not air in Birmingham for the next two years. This was due, of course, to both networks' feeding their newscasts to affiliates at 5:30 p.m. Central Time (as they continue to do today). Channel 13 aired its local newscast at 6 p.m., and prior to 1971, prime-time network programming began at 6:30 p.m. Central time. This left no room on the schedule for the ''CBS Evening News'' to air, even if the station management had wanted to broadcast it. When WBMG-TV (channel 42, now WIAT) signed on in 1965, it nominally had a CBS affiliation, but CBS allowed WAPI-TV to continue airing its higher-rated programming. This was largely because WBMG had only started one year after the Federal Communications Commission required that new television sets include all-channel tuning, and relatively few households in the area at the time had sets with built-in UHF tuning, or expensive converter boxes to enable older sets to pick up UHF signals. To fill out the schedule, WBMG aired some NBC programs that WAPI-TV turned down (such as ''The Tonight Show''). Both stations listed "CBS/NBC" as their affiliation. However, in May 1970, for a number of reasons, WAPI-TV became the exclusive NBC affiliate, sending all of CBS's programming to WBMG. At the same time that channel 13 became an exclusive affiliate of NBC and WBMG aligned with CBS, WCFT-TV (channel 33) in Tuscaloosa and WHMA-TV (channel 40, later WJSU-TV) in Anniston, two UHF stations respectively serving the western and eastern portions of Central Alabama, also affiliated with CBS; both signed on the air in the late 1960s, as WBMG was. Prior to that time, the primetime schedule of WCFT and WHMA virtually mirrored that of WBMG, because of WAPI's exclusive rights to network programming shown on that station for all the viewing area. During the 1970s, WAPI ran a distant second to WBRC in local news and general viewership, but was far ahead of WBMG, which was one of the lowest-rated commercial stations in the U.S. then. It was only in western and eastern Alabama that the CBS affiliates, WCFT and WHMA, were competitive against WBRC and WAPI, particularly in local newscasts designed for those areas only. The Newhouse company (now known as Advance Publications) departed the broadcasting business in the early 1980s to focus exclusively on its newspaper holdings. The Newhouse television stations, including WAPI-TV, were sold to the Los Angeles-based Times-Mirror Company, and as a result the station changed its calls to the present WVTM-TV (for Vulcan Times-Mirror) on March 28, 1980. In 1993, Times-Mirror sold WVTM along with its sister stations—KTVI in St. Louis, KDFW in Dallas, and KTBC in Austin, Texas—to Argyle Broadcasting. In 1994, New World Communications, which had recently cut an affiliation deal with Fox, agreed to purchase the four outlets. However, New World also decided to purchase several stations from Great American Broadcasting, including WBRC. New World was able to close on its purchase of WBRC on October 12, 1994 because the transfer applications of the Argyle stations were not submitted to the FCC until after the Citicasters (renamed from Great American Broadcasting) purchase was already finalized. However, WBRC and WGHP in High Point, North Carolina were immediately placed in an outside trust company since Citicasters changed its plans for both stations and decided to sell them directly to Fox once it discovered New World's plan to purchase the Argyle stations (which would have left New World over the FCC-mandated limit of 12 stations that was in effect at the time). In January 1995, while awaiting for the Argyle purchase to receive FCC approval, New World took over the operations of the Argyle stations, including WVTM, through time brokerage agreements. The transfers of WBRC and WGHP to the trust were completed in early April 1995 while the New World purchase of the Argyle stations closed on April 14. As such, WVTM retained its NBC affiliation, while KTVI (formerly an ABC affiliate), KDFW and KTBC (both former CBS affiliates) switched their affiliations to Fox. Fox operated WBRC as an ABC affiliate until 1996, as its contract with that network did not expire until that September. New World sold off all its stations in 1996. Its Fox affiliates were sold to Fox outright, while its two NBC stations (WVTM and KNSD channel 39 in San Diego) were sold to NBC itself; the sale of WVTM and KNSD to NBC closed in July 1996.〔(NBC and New World Announce Closing of Sale of Birmingham TV Station to NBC )〕 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「WVTM-TV」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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