> I think there was one in Rochester, New York between WHEC
> and WVET, with the former eventually buying-out the latter.
> I believe they shared the CBS affiliation, given they shared
> the same channel.
That's correct.
There were four applicants for channel 10 in Rochester in the early fifties, all of them incumbent radio operators. WRNY 680, WARC 950, WVET 1280 and WHEC 1460 all wanted the city's second TV license to compete against what was then WHAM-TV.
Along the way, Gannett's WHEC and the Veterans Broadcasting Company's WVET realized they could get a huge advantage on their opponents simply by joining forces. They were granted the share-time on channel 10 and went on the air November 1, 1953 from a common transmitter but separate studios.
WARC and WRNY were each granted UHF construction permits, but neither WARC-TV 15 nor WRNY-TV 27 were ever built, and the CPs eventually were cancelled in the sixties.
WVET-TV and WHEC-TV were a fairly cooperative pair of stations. They had a common logo, and apparently shared advertising as well. (From what I've seen in TV Guide and newspaper ads of the era, the promotions were often simply for "Channel 10," without mentioning the calls.)
They shared both the CBS and ABC affiliation, though of course most of the programming they carried was from CBS. They had a complicated share-time schedule that alternated prime-time and afternoon programming. WVET-TV apparently had the early-evening local news to itself, and the stations alternated the late news, so the WHEC-TV news department was a vestigial operation that was essentially on the air only three nights a week.
Around 1955, there was some discussion of buying the WRNY-TV 27 construction permit and putting an ABC affiliate on 27, to be operated by whichever half of the WVET/WHEC sharetime wasn't on 10 at the moment. (The inspiration, of course, was the WFAA/WBAP radio sharetime in Dallas-Fort Worth, in which ABC stayed on 570 and NBC on 820 regardless of which station was operating the frequency.)
This did not come to pass, and with the FCC preparing to drop a third VHF channel into the market in the early sixties (it signed on as WOKR 13 in 1962, operated by a consortium of nine competing applicants for the channel), the WVET/WHEC sharetime came to an end. In 1961, with Transcontinent Television putting the former WHAM-TV (now WROC-TV) on the market, Veterans emerged as a buyer.
In 1962, Veterans moved the WVET staff (and WVET 1280) from their 17 S. Clinton Ave. studios to the WROC-TV building on Humboldt Street (built in 1948 as "WHAM Radio City"). WVET 1280 became WROC(AM), and the WROC-FM 97.9 operation that Transcontinent had put on the air in 1959 continued on as well under Veterans ownership.
This was also the point at which WROC-TV moved from channel 5 to channel 8, exchanging dial positions with WHEN-TV in Syracuse (and enabling a channel 9 to be dropped in to Syracuse). The effect, from Veterans' perspective, was to allow them to paint the "new" WROC-TV as a continuation of the WVET-TV operation. It would seem that Transcontinent's operation of WROC-TV wasn't very popular in the market, and Veterans was eager to distance itself from that era in the station's history.
The WVET-TV license was quietly sold to Gannett, which took WHEC-TV fulltime on channel 10. The 17 S. Clinton Avenue studio facility ended up becoming WOKR's first home when it debuted later that year. (It was subsequently demolished in a fit of urban renewal to build what's now the Chase Tower.)
Interestingly, there was a proposal for ANOTHER share-time in Rochester. One of the competing applicants for channel 13 was the Rochester Area Educational Television Association (RAETA), which had been producing educational shows that aired on channels 5 and 10 for a few years. It proposed a similar operation to the WMSB/WILX sharetime in Michigan, in which RAETA would have the channel during the day for educational use and a commercial operator would have it at night for ABC programming. Instead, RAETA became a partner in the interim licensee on 13, dropping out shortly thereafter to operate the channel 21 construction permit that had been issued to the SUNY Board of Regents.
Channel 21 signed on September 6, 1966 as WXXI, and today RAETA is known as the WXXI Public Broadcasting Council (and is a part-time employer of mine.)
Channel 13 remained under an interim licensee until 1967, when the FCC finally awarded the channel to one of the applicants. <P ID="signature">______________
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