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In broadcasting, sister stations or sister channels are radio or television stations operated by the same company, either by direct ownership or through a management agreement. [1]
Radio sister stations will often have different formats, and sometimes one station is on the AM band while another is on the FM band. Conversely, several types of sister-station relationships exist in television; stations in the same city will usually be affiliated with different television networks (often one with a major network and the other with a secondary network), and may occasionally shift television programs between each other when local events require one station to interrupt its network feed.
Sister stations in separate (but often nearby) cities owned by the same company may or may not share a network affiliation. For example, WNYW and WWOR-TV, in New York City and Secaucus, New Jersey, are both owned by Fox Corporation. WNYW is a Fox owned-and-operated station; WWOR-TV is a MyNetworkTV owned-and-operated station. WPSG in Philadelphia and KBCW in San Francisco were the flagship stations of The CW until 2022 and are owned by CBS Television Stations. In addition, stations in different cities affiliated with the same network, but not sharing an ownership tie, may refer to each other informally as sister stations.
Sister networks or sister channels, in many cases, are cable or satellite channels which are launched to either broadcast series which either premiered on the main network but has been moved out of the higher-priority schedule (such as TV Land or Boomerang), fulfill a specific niche of content which would not be fulfilled on the main network (such as the Nick Jr. Channel [2] or Nicktoons) or broadcast to a wider audience than the main network (such as CNN International or Al Jazeera English). However, in other cases, these cable or satellite channels may only share common ownership.
The establishment and proliferation of sister networks on cable, satellite and internet providers has become easier and more commercially profitable over the history of such media venues.
The United Paramount Network (UPN) was an American broadcast television network that operated from 1995 to 2006. It was originally owned by Chris-Craft Industries' subsidiary, United Television. Viacom turned it into a joint venture in 1996 after acquiring a 50% stake in UPN, and subsequently purchased Chris-Craft's remaining stake in 2000. On December 31, 2005, UPN was kept by CBS Corporation, which was the new name for Viacom when it split into two separate companies. On January 24, 2006, CBS Corporation and Time Warner jointly announced that the companies would shut down UPN and competitor The WB to launch a new joint venture network later that year. UPN ceased broadcasting on September 15, 2006, with The WB following two days later. Select programs from both networks moved to the new network, The CW, when it launched on September 18, 2006.
A television broadcaster or television network is a telecommunications network for the distribution of television content, where a central operation provides programming to many television stations, pay television providers or, in the United States, multichannel video programming distributors. Until the mid-1980s, broadcast programming on television in most countries of the world was dominated by a small number of terrestrial networks. Many early television networks such as the BBC, CBC, PBS, PTV, NBC or ABC in the US and in Australia evolved from earlier radio networks.
Television is one of the major mass media outlets in the United States. In 2011, 96.7% of households owned television sets; about 114,200,000 American households owned at least one television set each in August 2013. Most households have more than one set. The percentage of households owning at least one television set peaked at 98.4%, in the 1996–1997 season. In 1948, 1 percent of U.S. households owned at least one television; in 1955, 75 percent did. In 1992, 60 percent of all U.S. households had cable television subscriptions. However, this number has fallen to 40% in 2024.
WNYW is a television station in New York City, serving as the flagship of the Fox network. It is owned and operated by the network's Fox Television Stations division alongside Secaucus, New Jersey–licensed MyNetworkTV flagship WWOR-TV. The two stations share studios at the Fox Television Center on East 67th Street in Manhattan's Lenox Hill neighborhood; WNYW's transmitter is located at One World Trade Center.
WABM is a television station in Birmingham, Alabama, United States, affiliated with MyNetworkTV. It is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group alongside Homewood-licensed CW affiliate WTTO and low-power ABC affiliate WBMA-LD ; Sinclair also operates Bessemer-licensed WDBB, which serves as a full satellite station of WTTO, under a local marketing agreement (LMA) with Sinclair partner company Cunningham Broadcasting. However, Sinclair effectively owns WDBB as the majority of Cunningham's stock is owned by the family of deceased group founder Julian Smith.
Superstation is a term in North American broadcasting that has several meanings. Commonly, a "superstation" is a form of distant signal, a broadcast television signal—usually a commercially licensed station—that is retransmitted via communications satellite or microwave relay to multichannel television providers over a broad area beyond its primary terrestrial signal range.
WWOR-TV is a television station licensed to Secaucus, New Jersey, United States, serving the New York City area as the flagship of the MyNetworkTV programming service. It is owned and operated by Fox Television Stations alongside Fox flagship WNYW. The two stations share studios at the Fox Television Center on East 67th Street in Manhattan's Lenox Hill neighborhood; WWOR-TV's transmitter is located at One World Trade Center.
WCWN is a television station licensed to Schenectady, New York, United States, serving the Capital District as an affiliate of The CW. It is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group alongside CBS affiliate WRGB. Both stations share studios on Balltown Road in Niskayuna, New York, while WCWN's transmitter is located on the Helderberg Escarpment west of New Salem. WCWN brands as CW 15 after the cable channel position on Charter Spectrum and Verizon Fios.
WWLP is a television station in Springfield, Massachusetts, United States, affiliated with NBC and The CW Plus. Owned by Nexstar Media Group, the station has studios at Broadcast Center in the Sandy Hill section of Chicopee at the northwest corner of the I-391/MA 116/Chicopee Street interchange, and its transmitter is located on Provin Mountain in the Feeding Hills section of Agawam.
The geographical usage of television varies around the world with a number of different transmission standards in use and differing approaches by government in relation to ownership and programme content.
In the broadcasting industry, an owned-and-operated station usually refers to a television or radio station owned by the network with which it is associated. This distinguishes such a station from an affiliate, which is independently owned and carries network programming by contract.
Syndication exclusivity is a federal law implemented by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the United States that is designed to protect a local television station's rights to syndicated television programs by granting exclusive broadcast rights to the station for that program in their local market, usually defined by a station's Nielsen Designated Market Area.
In broadcasting, digital subchannels are a method of transmitting more than one independent program stream simultaneously from the same digital radio or television station on the same radio frequency channel. This is done by using data compression techniques to reduce the size of each individual program stream, and multiplexing to combine them into a single signal. The practice is sometimes called "multicasting".
WFXQ-CD is a low-power, Class A television station in Springfield, Massachusetts, United States. It is a translator of dual NBC/CW+ affiliate WWLP, owned by Nexstar Media Group. WFXQ-CD's transmitter is located at the old Mount Tom Ski Area summit in Holyoke. Its parent station maintains studios at Broadcast Center in the Sandy Hill section of Chicopee at the northwest corner of the I-391/MA 116/Chicopee Street interchange.
In the United States, owned-and-operated television stations constitute only a portion of their parent television networks' station bodies, due to ownership limits imposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Currently, the total number of television stations owned by any company can only reach a maximum of 39% of all U.S. households; in the past, the ownership limit was much lower, and was determined by a specific number of television stations rather than basing the limits on total market coverage.
Several Major League Baseball teams have historically carried their games on superstations, which are broadcast television stations that are distributed on a regional or national basis on cable and satellite television.
In the broadcasting industry, a network affiliate or affiliated station is a local broadcaster, owned by a company other than the owner of the network, which carries some or all of the lineup of television programs or radio programs of a television or radio network. This distinguishes such a television or radio station from an owned-and-operated station (O&O), which is owned by the parent network.
A duopoly is a situation in television and radio broadcasting in which two or more stations in the same city or community share common ownership.
Bounce TV is an American digital broadcast television network owned by Scripps Networks, a subsidiary of E. W. Scripps Company. It launched on September 26, 2011, and was promoted as "the first 24/7 digital multicast broadcast network created to target African Americans". Bounce features a mix of original and acquired programming geared toward African Americans between 25 and 54 years of age.