15 Facts About WIVB-TV

WIVB-TV is a television station in Buffalo, New York, United States, affiliated with CBS.

WIVB-TV nearly dropped its CBS affiliation and became an NBC affiliate in 1994, when King World put itself up for sale .

At the time of the aborted NBC purchase, WIVB-TV's viewership was in a strong second place in the local ratings, while NBC's existing affiliate WGRZ-TV was in third place, although not as distant as it had been throughout much of the 1980s and early 1990s.

WIVB-TV gained the local rights to the Buffalo Bills from WGRZ-TV in 1998, when the American Football Conference package moved to CBS.

News operation at WIVB-TV has historically favored a straight newscast, as opposed to the more activist approach of WGRZ .

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In March 2001, WIVB-TV began airing a nightly 10 p m newscast on WNLO known as The 10 O'Clock News.

WIVB-TV previously operated a local Doppler radar in the 1990s and early 2000s, but shut it down in the early 2000s in favor of using data from the nearby National Weather Service Doppler Radar in Cheektowaga.

WIVB-TV ended its separate sports segments in March 2015 and integrated sports reports into the regular newscasts.

The cable carriage disputes in October 2008 threatened WIVB-TV's high standing, pushing the station to a distant third, but with the official November sweeps out and the disputes resolved, WIVB-TV regained the lead.

The end of The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2010, which traditionally has given a strong lead-in to WIVB-TV's newscasts, were expected to mark the end of WIVB-TV's lead in the ratings.

WIVB-TV served as the default CBS station for portions of Steuben County, New York, due to the absence of a local affiliate in the Elmira market; this lasted until 2009 when Elmira ABC affiliate WENY-TV launched a third digital subchannel that is affiliated with CBS.

WIVB-TV has had significant contract disputes with both of the major cable television providers in the station's coverage area, Time Warner Cable and Atlantic Broadband .

In both cases, WIVB-TV demanded a rights fee of 25 cents per month per subscriber and refused to allow the carriers the right to carry the signal.

In Erie, Cattaraugus, Allegany, and western Steuben counties, WIVB-TV continues to enforce its syndication exclusivity on Bills games preventing them from being brought in from another market.

However, due to this date falling on a holiday, WIVB-TV granted a 30-day extension at the end of which was an agreement that allowed WIVB-TV to continue to be carried uninterrupted.