The station operated on UHF channel 59 from studios in the
Hotel Lafayette in Buffalo. WBES-TV, the second UHF station (and third TV station overall) in Western New York, was very short-lived, signing on September 29, 1953 and shutting down for the last time on December 19 of the same year. An
independent station for its entire existence, WBES-TV was plagued by technical and financial problems, the primary factor in the station's failure. Its efforts to affiliate with a network were rejected, as the networks were waiting on the remaining VHF allocations to be built. After WBES-TV was shut down, Buffalo was left with two stations, market leader WBEN-TV and fellow UHF upstart
WBUF-TV (channel 17);
WGR-TV (channel 2) signed on for the very first time on August 14, 1954, using WBES-TV's broadcast tower. In 1955, WBES-TV's channel 59 allocation was sold to Frontier Television, who in 1957 petitioned the
Federal Communications Commission to move the allocation to channel 29. Planned as
WNYT-TV, the new station would have operated out of the studios of WBUF and used equipment donated by that station. The FCC granted the move, though Frontier would never bring it to air after its chairman determined that competing against VHF channels was not economically feasible; channel 29 eventually made it to air as
WUTV in 1970. ==References==