The Crosley/Avco years WLWT was established by the
Crosley Broadcasting Corporation, owners of
WLW (700 AM), one of the United States' most powerful radio stations. Crosley Broadcasting was a subsidiary of the Crosley Corporation, which became a subsidiary of the Aviation Corporation (later known as
Avco) in 1945. After starting experimental broadcasts in 1946 as W8XCT on
channel 1, the station began commercial broadcasts on February 9, 1948, on
VHF channel 4, making it Cincinnati's first television station and Ohio's second (after
WEWS,
Cleveland). The station's studios were housed with WLW in the
Crosley Square building, a converted
Elks lodge in downtown Cincinnati. Show
appearing in TV Guide''. WLWT counts itself as the first television station outside the Eastern U.S. (other than network-owned stations) to become a primary NBC television affiliate, but originally carried programming from all the major television networks of the time: NBC,
ABC,
CBS and
DuMont. WLWT later affiliated exclusively with NBC in 1949, after
WKRC-TV (originally on channel 11, now on channel 12) and
WCPO-TV (originally on channel 7, now on channel 9) signed on during that year. Following the release of the
FCC's
Sixth Report and Order in 1952, all of Cincinnati's VHF stations changed channels. WLWT was reassigned to channel 5, as the previous channel 4 allocation was shifted north to
Columbus and given to sister station WLWC (now
WCMH-TV), which began operations in April 1949. In addition to WLWT and WLWC, Crosley also operated stations in nearby markets, WLWD (channel 2, now
WDTN) in
Dayton, which signed-on in March 1949; and WLWI (channel 13, now
WTHR) in
Indianapolis, which opened in October 1957. These four inter-connected stations were branded on-air as the "WLW Network", and their call letters were stylized with hyphens to further reflect their connections to each other—the Cincinnati station, the group's flagship, was known as "WLW-T". Crosley also owned WLWA (now
WXIA-TV) in
Atlanta (purchased in 1953 and sold in 1962) and
WOAI-TV in
San Antonio (acquired in 1965, sold in 1974). The three WLW television stations in Ohio were NBC affiliates, and carried common programming along with WLWI in Indianapolis (an ABC affiliate). Most of these shows were produced at the WLWT studios on Crosley Square, and included
The Ruth Lyons 50-50 Club (later hosted by
Bob Braun after Lyons' retirement in 1967), the
Paul Dixon Show and
Midwestern Hayride; some of these programs were syndicated regionally to other stations outside of the Crosley group. In 1957, WLWT became the first station in the Cincinnati market to begin
color television broadcasts. It later became the first station in the nation to broadcast entirely in color, giving Cincinnati the nickname "Colortown U.S.A." by 1962. As a result, the stations all lost their grandfathered protection, which led to an ownership conflict situation which Hearst-Argyle (predecessor to today's Hearst Television) would encounter two decades later (the FCC has since relaxed its adjacent-market ownership rules). All of the "WLW Network" TV stations except for flagship WLWT would change their call signs, leaving WLWT as the only one with any physical evidence that it was connected to WLW radio, a station that ironically would be a sister station to WLWT's rival WKRC-TV years later. Multimedia would later acquire Avco Program Sales and with it, the regional syndication rights to Braun's program, along with
The Phil Donahue Show; the resulting subsidiary,
Multimedia Entertainment, was initially based at WLWT. In July 1995, the
Gannett Company announced that it would acquire Multimedia. Once the deal was approved in November of that year, the FCC ruled that Gannett would have to divest WLWT,
WMAZ-TV in
Macon, Georgia, and
KOCO-TV in
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, due to ownership restrictions; Gannett ultimately retained ownership of WMAZ-TV after the FCC allowed companies to own more television stations. As Gannett had owned
The Cincinnati Enquirer since 1979 (and remains the newspaper's owner to this day) and had recently acquired Oklahoma City–based cable provider Multimedia Cablevision, the company had to obtain a temporary waiver of an FCC
cross-ownership rule which prohibited common ownership of a television station and a newspaper or a cable television provider in the same market in order for Gannett to close on the Multimedia group. When the waiver expired in December 1996, Gannett opted to keep the
Enquirer (as well as sister newspaper
The Niagara Gazette, which would later be sold) and swap WLWT and KOCO-TV to Argyle Television Holdings II in exchange for
WGRZ in
Buffalo, New York, and
WZZM in
Grand Rapids, Michigan, a deal which was finalized in January 1997. Argyle merged with the broadcasting unit of the
Hearst Corporation to form Hearst-Argyle Television in August 1997. Hearst had owned WDTN (the former WLWD) since 1981, but was not allowed to keep both stations due to a since-repealed FCC rule prohibiting common ownership of stations with overlapping city-grade signals. In 1998, Hearst traded WDTN and
WNAC-TV in
Providence, Rhode Island, to
Sunrise Television in exchange for
KSBW in
Salinas, California,
WPTZ in
Plattsburgh, New York, and
WNNE in
Hartford, Vermont. WLWT's licensee name under Multimedia and Gannett ownership, "Multimedia Entertainment, Inc.", survives to this day as the licensee name for WGRZ. In June 1996, WKRC-TV and WCPO-TV traded networks, leaving WLWT as the only Cincinnati television station to never change its affiliation. Additionally, the purchase by Hearst made WLWT
sister stations with Hearst flagship stations
WTAE-TV in
Pittsburgh and
WBAL-TV in
Baltimore, leading to all three stations to have a friendly rivalry with each other during the
NFL season, as all three local NFL teams (
Cincinnati Bengals,
Pittsburgh Steelers,
Baltimore Ravens) are division rivals in the
AFC North. WLWT briefly aired
UPN programming as a secondary affiliation during the early morning hours on weekends at certain points in 1998 (the network was then limited to a six-hour weekly schedule), after that netlet was displaced from its previous affiliate
WSTR-TV (channel 64) by
The WB. The expected lower ratings in a late night time slot on WLWT (along with low promotion of UPN programming outside of
Star Trek: Voyager) saw UPN capitulate and affiliate with former WB affiliate
WBQC-CA (channel 25) in September 1998 as the network expanded to a ten-hour schedule that month which would have likely seen program rejections from WLWT due to lack of schedule room. In June 1999, WLWT moved its studios from Crosley Square to the
Mount Auburn neighborhood, in a building that once served as the corporate headquarters of WKRC-TV's founding owners
Taft Broadcasting. This is because after abandoning local non-news program production, the station found that Crosley Square, with its two-story ballrooms and basement newsroom, was built more for live entertainment broadcasts than a news operation. On July 9, 2012, WLWT's parent company Hearst Television was involved in a dispute with
Time Warner Cable, leading to WLWT being pulled from Time Warner Cable and temporarily replaced with
Nexstar Broadcasting Group station
WTWO in
Terre Haute, Indiana; Time Warner opted for such a distant signal like WTWO, as it does not have the rights to carry any NBC affiliate closest to them. The substitution of WTWO in place of WLWT lasted until July 19, 2012, when a carriage deal was reached between Hearst and Time Warner. In 2014, the station aired a
Thursday Night Football game from
NFL Network (produced by
CBS Sports) in lieu of CBS affiliate
WKRC-TV, who exercised their option of the
right of first refusal. The station today airs up to four Bengals games a year, usually as part of
NBC Sunday Night Football or ESPN's
Monday Night Football (WLWT parent Hearst holds a 20 percent interest in the ESPN joint venture with
Disney). The latter (if not a national simulcast on ABC through WCPO-TV) means a
delay of
The Voice to overnight hours, with voting limited to the internet during the program's normal timeslot. ==Programming==