11 Facts About WIAT

WIAT is a television station in Birmingham, Alabama, United States, affiliated with CBS and owned by Nexstar Media Group.

At that time, WIAT discontinued all references to its callsign and erstwhile slogan, "It's About Time, " within its on-air branding, instead concentrating on establishing the station's association with CBS and restructuring the news department's focus towards more in-depth investigative reporting.

WIAT has particularly benefited from the network's broadcasts of college football games from the Southeastern Conference, which garner higher ratings on channel 42 than on any other station in the country.

The FCC approved the sale on October 2, and the transaction was finalized ten days later on October 12; as a result, WIAT became a sister station to LIN's Mobile duopoly of Fox affiliate WALA-TV and CW affiliate WFNA, both of which had been purchased by LIN from Emmis Communications in 2006.

WIAT carries the entire CBS programming schedule; however, it broadcasts the network's Saturday morning programming out of pattern, airing CBS Saturday Morning after the network's educational program block, CBS Dream Team; the station airs the third hour of the Dream Team lineup on Sunday mornings on tape delay following the weekend edition of Wake Up Alabama.

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The ratings for WIAT's newscasts continued to steadily improve over the next several years, allowing it to become more competitive than ever before.

In recent years, WIAT has won many regional and national journalism awards for its reporting; in 2007 and 2008, WIAT won more Alabama Broadcasters Association Awards than any other station, as well as numerous Associated Press Awards.

WIAT was awarded the "Alabama Television Station of the Year" award by the Alabama Broadcasters Association in 2010 and 2012, and is the only Alabama television station to have won the award twice.

Unable to make ratings headway against WBRC's longer-established – and much higher-rated – prime time newscast, WTTO terminated the agreement, with the WIAT-produced newscast ending on October 13,2006, nearly one month after channel 21 became a CW affiliate.

In 2007, WIAT launched a second digital subchannel on virtual channel 42.

WIAT shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 42, on June 12,2009, the official date in which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate.