WSVN

WSVN (channel 7) is a television station in Miami, Florida, United States, affiliated with the Fox network. It is the flagship station of locally based Sunbeam Television. WSVN's studios are located on 79th Street Causeway (SR 934) in North Bay Village (though with a Miami postal address), and its transmitter is located in Miami Gardens, Florida. History WCKT WCKT first signed on the air on July 29, 1956, as WCKT. Originally operating as an NBC affiliate, it was founded by the Biscayne Television Corporation, a partnership between the Cox and Knight publishing families (from which the original call letters were derived [Cox Knight Television]), who respectively owned Miami's two major newspapers: the now-defunct Miami News and the still-operating Miami Herald. The same Cox/Knight partnership also owned WCKR radio (610 AM, now WIOD, and 97.3 FM, now WFLC). Niles Trammell, a former NBC president, held a 15 percent ownership interest in WCKT. Before WCKT signed on, NBC programming had been carried on Fort Lauderdale's WFTL-TV (channel 23, later known as WGBS-TV after it had been acquired by Storer Broadcasting), which also held a secondary affiliation with the DuMont Television Network. However, WFTL struggled because television sets were not required to have UHF tuning capability (the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) would later require such tuners to be included in sets manufactured from 1964 onward). It did not help matters that much of the area, particularly Fort Lauderdale, got a fairly strong signal from WJNO-TV (channel 5, now WPTV) in West Palm Beach. When the Cox/Knight partnership won a construction permit and broadcast license to operate a station on VHF channel 7, NBC quickly agreed to move its affiliation to WCKT, since WCKR radio had been the longtime Miami affiliate of the NBC Blue Network (the forerunner to today's American Broadcasting Company (ABC)). Until WPST-TV (channel 10, now WPLG) signed on in August 1957, WCKT also shared ABC programming with WTVJ (channel 4), as part of an arrangement with the network to provide its programming throughout the market as television sets were not required to have UHF tuning capability at the time, preventing many in the area from receiving the market's original ABC affiliate, WITV (channel 17). Channel 23 became an independent station and eventually went dark, and later came back to the air in 1967 as WAJA-TV (it is now Univision flagship WLTV-DT).