WMC-TV

WMC-TV (channel 5) is a television station in Memphis, Tennessee, United States, affiliated with NBC and owned by Gray Television. Its studios are located on Union Avenue in midtown Memphis, and its transmitter is located in northeast Memphis, near the suburb of Bartlett, Tennessee. History The station first signed on the air on November 13, 1948, as WMCT, initially transmitting on VHF channel 4. WMCT was also the first television station in the state of Tennessee. This first transmission coincided with being the first football game telecast in Tennessee—the tenth meeting at Crump Stadium between Tennessee and Ole Miss. Daily programming for WMCT began on December 11, 1948. The station originally broadcast from studios located inside the Goodwyn Institute Building in Downtown Memphis. It was owned by the E. W. Scripps Company, along with the city's morning newspaper, The Commercial Appeal, the afternoon Memphis Press-Scimitar, WMC radio (790 AM), and WMCF (99.7 FM, now WLFP). As the only television station in Memphis for its first several years of operation, WMCT aired programming from all four national networks of the time: NBC, CBS, ABC and the now-defunct DuMont Television Network. However, it carried NBC as a primary affiliation, owing to WMC radio's longtime affiliation with the NBC Red Network. It lost CBS programming when WHBQ-TV (channel 13) signed on in September 1953, but continued to share ABC programming with WHBQ until January 1956, when WREC-TV (channel 3, now WREG-TV) launched as a full-time CBS affiliate with WHBQ taking over the ABC affiliation full-time. It lost DuMont when that network ceased operations in 1956. During the late 1950s, the station was also briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network. The station moved to VHF channel 5 on November 23, 1952, due to co-channel interference with fellow NBC affiliate WSM-TV in Nashville (now sister station WSMV) also on channel 4; however, this left WMCT shortspaced to another Nashville station, WLAC-TV (now WTVF), when that station signed on in 1954. Since at least the 1950s, WMC-TV's logo has included an illustration of a riverboat, a symbol of the Mississippi River region which the station serves. Since that time, its newscasts have opened with a riverboat whistle; its former AM sister used a whistle as its sounder from the 1930s to the 1990s. The station was known as "The Showplace of the South" during the 1960s.