Why doesn’t Wilmington have a CW network television station?
Although the government makes sure that brodacast network signals are free to the public, it never said everybody gets to see them. America’s broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CW, plus MyNetworkTV and Ion (formerly Pax) — rely on affiliates to transmit their signals across the country. And while the networks themselves own affiliates in some major markets, most of those affiliates are owned by other media companies, such as Raycom Media, which owns Wilmington’s NBC affiliate WECT and Fox affiliate WSFX. It is up to those companies to determine the profitability of running an affiliate in a certain market. So if we have no CW affiliate, it means nobody so far has thought we could support one. It’s actually not unusual for there to be local affiliates missing in certain regions. There wasn’t a CBS affiliate here from 1994 to March 2000, when WILM was launched by Capitol Broadcasting of Raleigh. The reason Wilmington cable subscribers can see the CW is beacuse of CW Plus, a serv
