WRGB
In 1942, W2XB opted to end experimental broadcasts and begin commercial programming. While the call sign WGY-TV was available, the company applied for and received the call sign WRGB, in honor of pioneering electric engineer Walter Ransom Gail Baker. WRGB signed on for the first time as a commercial station on February 26, 1942; becoming the second outside of New York City (after WPTZ in Philadelphia, now KYW-TV) and the fourth overall in the United States. The station moved into a state-of-the-art studio on Washington Avenue in Schenectady. It was the first building in the nation specifically designed for television.
In 1948, WRGB took on secondary affiliations with the three other networks in operation (CBS, ABC, and DuMont). At the time of the announcement, the station only broadcast for 28 hours a week.[2] On January 4, 1954, it moved from channel 4 to channel 6 to alleviate interference from WNBC-TV (then known as WRCA-TV) and Boston's WBZ-TV, and increased its radiated power approximately fourfold to 93,000 watts. WRGB dropped its secondary affiliations when WCDA (channel 41, now WTEN on channel 10) and WTRI (channel 35, now WNYT on channel 13) took the ABC and CBS affiliations respectively. From 1939 till 1957, the station's studio were located on Washington Avenue in downtown Schenectady. In 1957, WRGB moved to its current studio on Balltown Road on the line between Niskayuna and Schenectady; the old studio is currently occupied by Schenectady County Community College.
The longest-running locally produced children's television show, Freihofer's Breadtime Stories was broadcast on the station starting November 21, 1949.[3] WRGB produced two of the longest-running locally produced programs in television history: a quiz show called Answers Please and a bowling program entitled TV Tournament Time. After the cancellation of both by the late-1980s, WRGB's local programming has been variable and erratic, ranging from a local home shopping show to a weekly video countdown done with Top 40 stations WFLY and (later) WKKF.
In 1979, General Electric almost filed to sell WRGB to Group Six Broadcasting during a proposed General Electric merger with Cox Broadcasting, with Group Six being led by the station's general manager and vice president James J. Delmonico, which paid $24 million, but the deal apparently fell through due to a lack of FCC approval.[4]
On September 28, 1981, WRGB swapped affiliations with WAST (which would become what is now WNYT on the day of the switch) and became a CBS affiliate. WAST had only picked up the CBS affiliation four years earlier, but had remained stubbornly in third place behind WRGB and WTEN. Under the circumstances, when its affiliation contract with WAST ran out, CBS jumped at the chance to align with long-dominant WRGB. The switch made WRGB the third station in the Capital District to affiliate with CBS, with the newly rechristened WNYT taking over the NBC affiliation. The network had originally aired on WTRI, forerunner of WNYT, from 1954 to 1955, then moved to WCDA (now WTEN) from 1955 to 1977.
In August 1983, 41 years of General Electric ownership ended when it sold WRGB to Universal Communications Corporation which was owned by Forstmann Little and John D. Backe, a former CBS president and then president of Tomorrow Entertainment (GE would re-enter the TV business upon its purchase of RCA, then-parent company of NBC in late 1985, which WRGB was formerly affiliated with).[5] WRGB was sold to Freedom Communications in March 1986. In 1987, WRGB won the Broadcast Pioneers Golden Mike Award and shortly thereafter was awarded a Presidential Citation by Ronald Reagan.
In September 2003, WRGB-DT (UHF channel 39) became the first full-market digital signal to sign on in the Albany region. Around December 2007, WRGB and WCWN became the first television stations in the Capital District that upgraded to high definition time delay and rebroadcast capability, and high definition local broadcasts. This allows broadcasting of syndicated shows in high definition. WRGB changed its on-air name to "CBS 6" in October 2004.
Providence Equity Partners owned a controlling stake in Newport Television (formerly Clear Channel Communications' television division), the owner of local Fox affiliate WXXA (channel 23). As a result, the FCC granted conditional approval of Newport's acquisition of Clear Channel Television in late November 2007, provided that Providence Equity Partners would follow through with its planned divestiture of its 16 percent share of Freedom Communications to another company (as required when Providence Equity Partners purchased a minority stake in the Spanish-language broadcaster Univision earlier in 2007) as soon as the deal was finalized.[6] Freedom filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September 2009, emerging in April 2010. At that point, Providence Equity Partners relinquished its stake in Freedom Communications, making its purchase of WXXA legitimate.
Freedom announced on November 2, 2011, that it would bow out of television and sell its stations, including WRGB, to Sinclair Broadcast Group.[7] The group deal closed on April 2, 2012, after which Sinclair obtained a waiver allowing the company to keep both WRGB and WCWN. In 2016, WRGB adopted a logo similar to that of sister station WSYX in Columbus, Ohio, replacing the ABC logo with that of the CBS eye.
