KYW-TV logo, 1980s
September 12, 1994, 30 years ago: The great TV realignment. Because CBS (for a few years, anyway) lost their NFL contract, a lot of stations switched networks. This didn’t happen in New York, but in Philadelphia, on the other side of my Central Jersey base, it did: KYW-Channel 3 went from NBC to CBS, and WCAU-Channel 10 went from CBS to NBC.
The buying into NFL broadcast rights helped turn Fox from a distant 4th among networks, behind NBC, CBS and ABC, into a legitimate 4th network. It launched Fox Sports, which has since included Major League Baseball, college football, the NHL, and professional soccer.
And since individual stations valued NFL money more than CBS money, while some of them switched affiliates with NBC, some picked up the former "independent stations" that Fox had picked up in the 1980s, losing a lot of viewers.
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