WIVB-TV

WIVB-TV (channel 4) is a television station in Buffalo, New York, United States, affiliated with CBS. It is owned by Nexstar Media Group alongside CW owned-and-operated station WNLO (channel 23). WIVB-TV and WNLO share studios on Elmwood Avenue in North Buffalo; through a channel sharing agreement, the two stations transmit using WNLO's spectrum from a tower in Colden, New York.

The station first signed on the air on May 14, 1948, as WBEN-TV. It was Buffalo's first television station, and the fifth-oldest station in New York state. The station was originally owned by the Butler family, along with the Buffalo Evening News and WBEN radio (930 AM and 106.5 FM, now WBKV at 102.5); the holding company for the WBEN stations was WBEN, Inc. Its radio sister had been one of CBS Radio's first 16 affiliates when that network premiered in 1928, but by that point had switched networks to NBC Blue. Accordingly, channel 4 originally signed on as an NBC television affiliate, and with it aired The Howdy Doody Show, a show hosted by local native Bob Smith, who had spent the past few years at WBEN radio before departing for national television. WBEN-TV picked up CBS programming in January 1949, and has remained with that network ever since.

As the only station in Buffalo for its first several years, channel 4 also carried secondary affiliations with ABC and DuMont. It lost NBC when WGR-TV (channel 2, now WGRZ) signed on in August 1954, and ABC to WGR-TV when NBC moved its programs to newly purchased WBUF-TV (channel 17) in 1956. WBEN-TV continued to share DuMont programming with WGR-TV until 1956 when that network ceased operations. It operated from studios on the 18th floor of the Statler Hotel until 1960, when it moved to its current facilities on Elmwood Avenue. That studio—expanded by the WBEN stations—had originally been built for WBUF-TV, which had gone dark in 1958, two months before the sign-on of present-day ABC affiliate WKBW-TV (channel 7).

One early show running from the late 1940s until 1970 was Meet the Millers, a weekday afternoon series featuring Bill and Mildred Miller providing cooking and household tips. Two educational local shows aimed toward children were the hour-long Fun to Learn consisting of 15-minute segments which taught various subjects including the language of Spanish at 5 p.m. weekdays and the half-hour Your Museum of Science, which featured the curator of the Buffalo Museum of Science on Saturday mornings. Another staple throughout the 1950s and early 1960s was a short visit to the North Pole with Santa Claus and Forgetful the Elf. This was a daily show that aired only during December and was sponsored by Hengerer's Department Store. On September 23, 1977, the then-newly-renamed WIVB took over production of the public-access cable television program Disco Step by Step. In April 1976, the station signed a sister station agreement with Hokuriku Broadcasting from Kanazawa in central Japan.

When the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) disallowed same market co-ownership of newspapers and broadcast licenses in the early 1970s, the combination of the Buffalo Evening News and WBEN-AM-FM-TV was grandfathered under the new rule. However, the 1974 death of Katherine Butler (longtime owner and publisher of the Evening News) led to the placement of the Evening News' properties in a blind trust (since Butler left no heirs). This trust company then sold the newspaper to its current owner, Berkshire Hathaway in 1977. This sale brought an end to 101 years of Butler family ownership of the Evening News. With the loss of the WBEN stations' grandfathered protection, Berkshire Hathaway opted to keep the newspaper and sell off the broadcasting properties. WBEN-TV was sold to newspaper publisher Robert Howard of Oceanside, California, for $25.5 million. The new owner, whose company was called Howard Publications, Inc., changed channel 4's callsign to WIVB-TV, which stands for "We're Channel IV (Roman numeral 4) Buffalo", on November 1, 1977, the day after he purchased the station. The call-letter change was triggered due to an FCC regulation at the time prohibiting TV and radio stations in the same city, but with different owners, from sharing the same call letters. The WBEN callsign remains on 930 AM, which along with its FM sister station had been sold to Larry Levite's Algonquin Broadcasting (WBEN is now owned by Audacy; the FM, now WBKV, is owned by K-Love). Channel 4 was then sold to King World Productions (at that time a separate entity from both Viacom and CBS; the two would later split and remerge) for $100 million in 1988.

In the late 1970s, WBEN/WIVB ended up playing an early role in the emerging cable television industry. Their satellite uplink facility, initiated by general manager Les Arries in 1976, uplinked sporting events for worldwide distribution, and was used to transmit American TV programming into Canada until Canadian authorities put an end to this practice. Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment then began leasing the uplink facility to transmit the signals of their then-new cable networks Nickelodeon and The Movie Channel (originally known as Star Channel). Both networks moved to an uplink facility in Hauppauge, New York, by the end of 1981, after Warner-Amex was unable to reach a deal with WIVB's ownership over a planned expansion of the facility to handle uplinking and studio programming for their new music video channel MTV.

WIVB-TV nearly dropped its CBS affiliation and became an NBC affiliate in 1994, when King World put itself up for sale (NBC parent company General Electric's announced purchase of the company never materialized). After attempts by Westinghouse Broadcasting (whose parent company would later purchase CBS), New World Communications (to make the station a Fox affiliate), Tribune Broadcasting (to make a station a WB affiliate), Paramount Stations Group (to make a station a UPN affiliate), and E. W. Scripps Company (to make the station an ABC affiliate), to purchase the station fell through,^{[citation needed]} WIVB-TV was sold to LIN TV Corporation (which would later take the name LIN Media) in 1995; King World was acquired by CBS in 2000 and has since been absorbed into Paramount Global's CBS Media Ventures unit, while E. W. Scripps would later acquire rival WKBW in 2014 and, ironically, WIVB's current parent Nexstar would later acquire Tribune in 2019. The new owner renewed the station's CBS affiliation through a long-term contract; it was renewed in 2014, along with most of the rest of the contracts for LIN's CBS affiliates, and will expire at an unknown date. As a result of the cancellation of the deal, Buffalo was one of the few NFL markets that was not affected by the affiliation switches. At the time of the aborted NBC purchase, WIVB-TV's viewership was in a strong second place in the local ratings, while NBC's existing affiliate WGRZ-TV was in third place, although not as distant as it had been throughout much of the 1980s and early 1990s. Both stations have since passed then-first-place WKBW-TV.

WIVB-TV gained the local rights to the Buffalo Bills from WGRZ-TV in 1998, when the American Football Conference package moved to CBS. WGRZ-TV had aired most Bills games since 1965. Van Miller, channel 4's longtime sports director, was the Bills' play-by-play announcer from 1960 to 2003, except for a brief time in the 1970s when WKBW radio was the flagship. However, beginning in 2014 with the introduction of "cross-flex" scheduling, the NFL started arbitrarily moving select Bills games to WUTV, the local Fox affiliate.