WAFF (TV)

WAFF (channel 48) is a television station in Huntsville, Alabama, United States, affiliated with NBC. It is owned by Gray Media alongside low-power Telemundo affiliate WTHV-LD (channel 29). The two stations share studios on Memorial Parkway (US 431) in Huntsville; WAFF's transmitter is located south of Monte Sano State Park.

WAFF is northern Alabama's oldest television station. The station first began broadcasting from studios and transmitters in Decatur (30 miles (48 km) west of Huntsville) on July 4, 1954, as WMSL-TV, channel 23. It was owned by Frank Whisenant, a Decatur businessman whose company, Tennessee Valley Radio & Television Corporation, also owned WMSL radio (AM 1400, now WWTM). Both stations took their calls from Mutual Savings Life Insurance Company, who founded WMSL radio in 1935.

WMSL-TV originally carried programming from all four networks of the time—NBC, CBS, ABC and the DuMont Network—but was a primary NBC affiliate. It lost the DuMont Network when that one began closing down in 1955; it lost ABC when WAAY-TV started in Huntsville in 1959 as an ABC affiliate; and, finally, lost CBS when WHNT-TV began transmitting as a CBS affiliate in 1963.

During the late 1950s, WMSL was also affiliated briefly with the NTA Film Network.

Until the early 1960s, Decatur was the largest city in the viewing area, and it was centrally located—thus making it a good location for the region's first TV station. However, when Huntsville became the region's largest city due to the exponential growth of U.S. Army Missile Command and NASA installations, Whisenant decided to move WMSL-TV there as well; it was the only major station in the market licensed in Decatur. Whisenant applied to change WMSL-TV's city of license to Huntsville as well, even though the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had changed its regulations so it could have kept its license in Decatur. However, because the station's original channel assignment, channel 23, was too close in frequency to the area's Alabama Educational Television outlet, WHIQ (channel 25), the FCC required WMSL-TV to move to channel 48 as a condition on its permit to relocate its city of license. The move to a higher UHF frequency was highly unusual for that time, especially during the 1960s, when the All-Channel Receiver Act had only recently been passed. Many UHF stations that had started operations on channels above 40 or so were able to move to lower allocations per FCC action, or even to VHF.

WMSL-TV began broadcasting on channel 48 on January 7, 1969, while simulcasting on channel 23 for a week. A few months later, Whisenant closed the station's studios in Decatur when the new studios opened in Huntsville. In the meantime, Whisenant sold WMSL radio to Clete Quick, another Decatur businessman.

On September 1, 1967, about 16 months before moving to Huntsville, WMSL-TV had to begin sharing the NBC affiliation for North Alabama with WAAY-TV (meaning the market had no local ABC affiliate for a year; the network was available only on out-of-market stations in Birmingham, Nashville, and Chattanooga that were carried by area cable systems). Still, the new channel 48, which took over WAAY-TV's old ABC affiliation when its NBC contract expired in September 1968, made persistent efforts to serve its greatly expanded viewing area, which now included most of the Shoals region of northwestern Alabama.

In October 1974, Whisenant sold the station to Vermont-based International Television Corporation, which renamed the station WYUR-TV on March 9, 1975. Despite more aggressive attempts to promote its newscast, WYUR's ratings were far behind WAAY and WHNT. Then, on June 6, 1978, AFLAC, then known by its full name of American Family Life Assurance Company, bought the station, re-christening it WAFF after its slogan of the time, "American Families Finest". Some months earlier, on December 11, 1977, WAAY decided to return to ABC, as that network had become the nation's most popular, in prime time programming especially; in turn, this left channel 48 returning with the then-less-desirable NBC affiliation. AFLAC did not immediately turn the corner with WAFF; the station kept fine-tuning its newscasts and acquiring some nationally popular syndicated programs, but very little seemed to work.