WCVB-TV
ABC affiliate in Boston
WCVB-TV (channel 5) is a television station in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, affiliated with ABC and owned by Hearst Television. The station's studios are located on TV Place (off Gould Street near the I-95/MA 128/Highland Avenue interchange) in Needham, Massachusetts, and its transmitter is located on Cedar Street, also in Needham, on a tower shared with several other television and radio stations.
Nearby Manchester, New Hampshire, is considered part of the Boston media market, making WCVB-TV part of a nominal duopoly with WMUR-TV (channel 9), that city's ABC affiliate; however, the two stations maintain separate operations.
WCVB is also one of six Boston television stations that are carried by satellite provider Bell Satellite TV and fiber optic television provider Bell Fibe TV in Canada. Since 2010, midday and weekend late newscasts, along with World News Now, are overlaid with Canadian paid programming on those providers; however, the latter has carried the normal WCVB-TV feed in recent years.
History
Prior history of channel 5 in Boston (1957–1972)
The channel 5 allocation in Boston was first occupied by the original WHDH-TV, which signed on the air on November 26, 1957. The station was owned by the Boston Herald-Traveler Corporation, along with WHDH radio (850 AM, now WEEI; and 94.5 FM, now WJMN). It was originally an ABC affiliate, but switched to CBS in 1961.
However, almost as soon as it signed on, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) began investigating allegations of impropriety in the granting of the television station's construction permit. This touched off a struggle that lasted 15 years.
“WCVB-TV” enters the record as aBC affiliate in Boston. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what WCVB-TV, affiliate and Boston can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7948158. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2010, 1957, 1972 and 1961.
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This entry incorporates text from “WCVB-TV” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.