KDKA-TV (channel 2), branded as CBS Pittsburgh, is a television station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. It is owned and operated by the CBS television network through its CBS News and Stations division, and is sister to WPKD-TV (channel 19), an independent station. The two outlets share studios at the Gateway Center in Downtown Pittsburgh; KDKA-TV's transmitter is located in the city's Perry North neighborhood.
KDKA's establishment was part of post-World War I efforts of Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse Electric Corporation's ambition to expand commercial operations in the radio industry. During World War I, Westinghouse received government contracts to develop radio transmitters and receivers for military use, and also received permission to operate research radio transmitters located at its East Pittsburgh plant and at the home of one of its lead engineers, Frank Conrad, in nearby Wilkinsburg. KDKA eventually became affiliated with the NBC Blue Network.
Transition to television (1949–1954)
The station signed on as WDTV on January 11, 1949, as a primary affiliate of the former DuMont Television Network, while carrying secondary affiliations with CBS, NBC, and ABC. It originally broadcast on channel 3 and was owned and operated by DuMont parent company Allen B. DuMont Laboratories. It was the 51st television station in the U.S., the third and last DuMont-owned station to sign on the air (behind WABD (now WNYW) in New York City and WTTG in Washington, D.C.), and the first owned-and-operated station in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. To mark the occasion, a live television special aired that day from 8:30 to 11 p.m. on WDTV, which began with a one-hour local program broadcast from Syria Mosque in Pittsburgh. The remainder of the show featured live segments from DuMont, CBS, NBC, and ABC with Arthur Godfrey, Milton Berle, DuMont host Ted Steele, and many other celebrities.
The station also represented a milestone in the television industry, providing the link between the Midwestern and East Coast stations which included 13 other cities able to receive live telecasts from Boston to St. Louis for the first time. WDTV was one of the last stations to receive a construction permit before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)-imposed four-year freeze on new television station licenses.
When the release of the FCC's Sixth Report and Order ended the license freeze in 1952, DuMont was forced to give up its channel 3 allocation to alleviate interference with nearby stations broadcasting on the frequency, notably NBC-owned WNBK (now WKYC) in Cleveland, which itself moved to the frequency to avoid interference with stations in Columbus and Detroit. WDTV moved its facilities to channel 2 on November 23, 1952; WPSU-TV would later sign on with the channel 3 frequency for the Johnstown–Altoona market. Shortly after moving, it was the first station in the country (and also, in the world) to broadcast 24 hours a day, seven days a week, advertising that its 1–7 a.m. Swing Shift Theatre served the "200,000 workers [in their viewing area] who finished shift work at midnight". DuMont's network of stations on coaxial cable stretched from Boston to St. Louis. These stations were linked together via AT&T's coaxial cable feed with the sign-on of WDTV allowing the network to broadcast live programming to all the stations at the same time. Stations not yet connected to the coaxial cable received kinescope recordings via physical delivery.
Until the end of the freeze, WDTV's only competition came in the form of distant signals from stations in Johnstown, Altoona, Wheeling and Youngstown. However, Pittsburgh saw two UHF stations launch during 1953—ABC affiliate WENS (channel 16, later to become WINP-TV), and WKJF-TV (channel 53, later to become WPGH-TV), an independent station. At the time, UHF stations could not be viewed without the aid of an expensive set-top converter, and the picture quality was marginal at best with one. UHF stations in the area faced an additional problem because Pittsburgh is located in a somewhat rugged dissected plateau, and the reception of UHF stations is usually poor in such terrain. These factors played a role in the short-lived existences of both WKJF and WENS.
Although Pittsburgh was the sixth largest market in the country (behind New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Washington/Baltimore), the other VHF stations in town were slow to develop. This was because the major cities in the Upper Ohio Valley are so close together that they must share the VHF band. After the FCC lifted the license freeze in 1952, it refused to grant any new commercial VHF construction permits to Pittsburgh in order to give the smaller cities in the area a chance to get on the air. WDTV had a de facto monopoly on Pittsburgh television. Like its sister stations WABD and WTTG, it was far stronger than the DuMont network as a whole. According to network general manager Ted Bergmann, WDTV brought in $4 million a year, which was more than enough to keep the network afloat. Owning the only readily viewable station in such a large market gave DuMont considerable leverage in getting its programs cleared in large markets where it did not have an affiliate. As CBS, NBC and ABC had secondary affiliations with WDTV, this was a strong incentive to stations in large markets to clear DuMont's programs or risk losing valuable advertising in the sixth-largest market. Also, NBC affiliates from Johnstown (WJAC-TV, channel 6) and Wheeling (WTRF-TV, channel 7) were able to be received in Pittsburgh and a CBS affiliate from Steubenville, Ohio (WSTV-TV, now WTOV-TV) was also able to be received there as well. CBS, in fact, actually attempted to purchase WSTV-TV's license before it went on the air and move its channel 9 allocation to Pittsburgh due to the close proximity between Pittsburgh and Steubenville (At the time less than an hour apart by car; the completion of the Penn-Lincoln Parkway in 1964 reduced that time to about a half-hour driving time today), but the FCC turned CBS down. The Wheeling/Steubenville TV market, despite its very close proximity to Pittsburgh and overlapping signals, remains a separate market by FCC standards today.
WDTV aired all DuMont network shows live and "cherry-picked" the best shows from the other networks, airing them on kinescope on an every-other-week basis. WDTV's sign-on was also significant because it was now possible to feed live programs from the East to the Midwest and vice versa. In fact, its second broadcast was the activation of the coaxial cable linking New York City and Chicago. It would be another two years before the West Coast received live programming, but this was the beginning of the modern era of network television.
By 1954, DuMont was in serious financial trouble. Paramount Pictures, which owned a stake in DuMont, vetoed a merger with ABC, who had merged with Paramount's former theater division United Paramount Theaters a year before. A few years earlier, the FCC had ruled that Paramount controlled DuMont and there were still lingering questions about whether UPT had actually broken off from Paramount. Paramount did not want to risk the FCC's wrath.
Meanwhile, Westinghouse had been competing with local politicians to acquire the non-commercial channel 13 license from the FCC, as no other Pittsburgh-allocated VHF station would be signing on for the foreseeable future. After launching WBZ-TV in Boston in 1948 and purchasing two other television stations, Westinghouse was growing impatient with not having a station in its own home market. Before the freeze, Westinghouse was a shoo-in for the channel 6 license that would later be given to WJAC-TV in Johnstown after that station gave up the channel 13 allocation to Pittsburgh as part of the FCC's reallocation plan. Westinghouse later offered a compromise plan to the FCC, in which the commission would grant Westinghouse the channel 13 license; Westinghouse would then "share" the facility with the educational licensee. Finding the terms unacceptable, Pittsburgh attorney Leland Hazard called Westinghouse CEO Gwilym Price to ask him if he should give up on his fight for public television. Price said that Hazard should keep fighting for it, giving Westinghouse backing for the station that would eventually become WQED.