City of license

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A city of license or community of license, in American and Canadian broadcasting, is the community that a radio station or television station is officially licensed to serve by that country's broadcast regulator.

1 Licensing
2 Table of Allotments
3 References
4 See also

[edit] Licensing

While becoming less meaningful over the decades, stations are still required to post a public file somewhere within 25 miles of the city, and to cover the entire city with a signal. In the United States, a station's transmitter usually cannot be located more than 15 miles from the city of license, even if it primarily serves another city. For example, American television station WTTV primarily serves Indianapolis, Indiana; however, the transmitter is located farther south than the other stations in that city because it is licensed to Bloomington, 50 miles south of Indianapolis. In some cases, such as Jeannette, Pennsylvania-licensed WPCW-TV 19, the FCC has waived this requirement. WPCW claimed potential interference to co-channel Shaker Heights-licensed WOIO 19 as a successful pretext to justify this exemption.

FCC regulations also require stations at least once an hour to state the station's call letters, followed by the city of license. However, the FCC has no restrictions on additional names after the city of license, so many stations afterwards add the nearest large city. For example, American television station WOIO is licensed to Shaker Heights, a suburb of Cleveland. It is identified as "WOIO - WOIO DT Shaker Heights-Cleveland." Similarly, northern New York's WWNY identifies as WWNY-TV 7 Carthage-Watertown as a historical artefact; the original broadcasts originated from Champion Hill in 1954 so the license still reflects this tiny location.

If the station is licensed in the primary city served, on occasion the station will list a second city next to it. For example, American television station WTVT, licensed to Tampa, Florida, its primary city, identifies as "WTVT/WTVT-DT Tampa/St. Petersburg," as St. Petersburg is another major city in the market.

There is no longer a requirement to carry programs relevant to the particular community, or even necessarily to operate or transmit from that community. Accordingly, stations licensed to smaller communities in major metropolitan markets often target programming toward the entire market rather than the official home community, and often move their studio facilities to the larger urban centre as well. For instance, the Canadian radio station CFNY is officially licensed to Brampton, Ontario, although its studio and transmitter facilities are located in downtown Toronto.

This may, at times, lead to confusion — while media directories normally list broadcast stations by their legal community of license, audiences often disregard (or may even be entirely unaware of) the distinction.

[edit] Table of Allotments

In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission maintains a Table of Allotments, which assigns individual channel frequencies to individual cities or communities for both TV and radio. ^[1]

A corresponding Table of Allotments for digital television was created in 1997.^[2]. To operate a licensed station, a broadcaster must first obtain allocation of the desired frequencies in the FCC's Table of Allotments for the intended city of license. This process is subject to various political and bureaucratic restrictions, based on considerations including the number of existing stations in the area.

The term "city" has in some cases been relaxed to mean community, often including the unincorporated areas around the city that share a mailing address. This sometimes leads to inconsistencies, such as the licensing of one metro Atlanta station to the unincorporated Cobb County community of Mableton, but the refusal to license another to Sandy Springs, which is one of the largest cities in the state, and was at the time an unincorporated part of Fulton County only due to political reasons in the Georgia General Assembly. The FCC's reason, in part, was that Sandy Springs was "not a city", though Mableton is not either.

Often, the city of license does not correspond to the location of the station itself, of the primary audience or of the communities identified in the station's branding and advertising. Some of these include:

Broadcaster	City	Community of license	Comments
CBK (AM) 540	Regina	Watrous, Saskatchewan	The original historic AM transmitter was built in Watrous in 1939 to serve both Regina and Saskatoon from studios in Regina. Both cities are now served by local FM repeaters of CBK, yet the original clear-channel AM 540 and the community of license remain with tiny Watrous, population 1800.
CKBY-FM 101.1	Ottawa-Hull	Smiths Falls, Ontario	As station owner Rogers Communications already has multiple stations licensed to Ottawa, Ontario, limits on concentration of media ownership restrict it from moving additional stations into that city. The city of license has therefore remained at Smiths Falls, a town of 10000 people roughly 80km distant, and the station is absent from the Ottawa-Hull digital radio cluster.
CHLF-TV 39 TFO	Toronto	Hawkesbury, Ontario	La Chaîne Française, "TFO" (Télé-Française d'Ontario) is a repeater chain broadcasting the same signal in multiple small communities; it relies primarily on cable television for distribution in much of Ontario. Studios are in Toronto, the provincial capital, as TFO belongs to Ontario's government. The station is not physically available over-the-air in that community. As such, the choice of which of the multiple repeaters to designate as the primary station is arbitrary; Hawkesbury was chosen due to its proximity to Montréal, Québec's large francophone population.
CHWI-TV 16 / 60 A-Channel	Windsor-Détroit	Wheatley, Ontario	Founded 1993 as an independent local television station, licensed to Wheatley in an attempt to serve both Chatham and Windsor, Ontario. The UHF 16 Wheatley transmitter proved inadequate to cover Windsor so, in 1995, a Windsor repeater was deployed on channel 60. Newsrooms are in Windsor.
CIII-TV 6 Global	Toronto	Paris, Ontario	A chain of repeaters fed from Toronto and covering most of Ontario, the choice of a small town near Brantford for the nominal primary station was an arbitrary one. Toronto could've reasonably been chosen as nominal city of license, but to do so would be to name a suburban UHF outlet as the main station.
CKMI-TV 20 Global	Montréal	Sainte Foy, Québec City	Nominally, Québec is city of license and Montréal 46 / Sherbrooke 11 merely repeaters constructed after acquisition of the existing Québec station. As the studios, master control facilities and largest audience are Montréal, and the number of anglophones in mostly-francophone Québec City is small, this is de-facto a Montréal station in all but name.
KROQ-FM 106.7	Burbank - Los Angeles	Pasadena, California	Originally owned by the Pasadena Presbyterian Church and, until 1969, broadcast from a studio in the basement of the church. Multiple changes of ownership, location, format and callsign (the station went bankrupt more than once) ended with Infinity Broadcasting (now CBS) buying the station in 1986 and moving the studios to Burbank the following year. The city of license still indicates Pasadena.
WCTV 6 CBS	Tallahassee	Thomasville, Georgia	First broadcast in 1955 from a studio in Tallahassee, but was licensed to Thomasville using a transmitter in Metcalf, Georgia. The FCC had allocated only one VHF channel to Tallahassee, which was already in use by Florida State University's noncommercial WFSU-TV 11. WTLH Fox 49 also covers Tallahassee from a transmitter in Metcalf, Georgia.
WHYY 12 PBS	Philadelphia	Wilmington, Delaware	Originally licensed in 1957 as channel 35 Philadelphia. In an era where TV manufacturers were not required to provide UHF tuners, few could receive the station. When WVUE 12 Wilmington went off the air in 1958, WHYY applied to serve Wilmington as channel 12 was the nearest available VHF allocation.
WLYK-FM 102.7	Kingston	Cape Vincent, New York	A south-of-the-border station licensed to a tiny border village of 760 people. Owned by US-based Border International Broadcasting, but operated through a local marketing agreement from the Kingston (Williamsville) studios of CIKR-FM (K-Rock 105.7). Primary audience is Kingston, Ontario, population 117000.
WNET 13 PBS	New York	Newark, New Jersey	One of the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks, WNET once broadcast from a shared master antenna atop the former World Trade Center. Its community of license is Newark because the only means to acquire scarce VHF-TV spectrum in New York City was to purchase existing Newark independent WATV. An on-air identifying logo displays initially as "WNET Newark, New Jersey", then transitions to "WNET New York"; the station provides New Jersey local public-affairs coverage but is located entirely in New York City. Like other New Jersey licensees including WWOR-TV 9 Secaucus, WXTV 41 Paterson, WNJU 47 Linden and WFUT-TV 68 Newark, it now transmits from atop the Empire State Building.
WPCW 19 The CW	Pittsburgh	Jeannette, Pennsylvania	Originally a Johnstown station, one of the rare instances in which the community of license for an existing channel has successfully been changed. WPCW (then WTWB) managed to circumvent an FCC moratorium on new channel allocations in Pittsburgh by listing Jeannette, a small community of 11000 people technically in the Pittsburgh market area, as the new city of license for an existing station.^[3]. Effectively a flag of convenience, this manoeuvre portrays the station's owners as moving it from a community that had at least two other broadcasters (Johnstown) to one that had none (Jeannette)^[4] - easier to justify for regulatory purposes. The actual intended target market, Pittsburgh, already has many local stations. While the transmitter remains in Jennerstown (a small borough near Johnstown) and is inadequate to properly cover Pittsburgh over-the-air, this nominal community of license in the Pittsburgh market confers "must-carry" status for Pittsburgh's cable TV systems. Studios are at KDKA-TV Pittsburgh and city-grade coverage for Pittsburgh itself is supplied by a UHF repeater, the main transmitters never were moved, no physical connection of this station with the small community of Jeannette exists except as a very clever legal fiction.^[5] The station's new WPCW callsign is marketed using the slogan "Pittsburgh's CW", and has filed two construction permit applications to base a future digital transmitter within Allegheny County that would still give Jeannette a decent signal.
WPWR-TV 50 MyTV	Chicago	Gary, Indiana	WPWR operates from Chicago studios, transmitting from the Sears Tower, but is licensed out-of-state. Its owners obtained this channel allocation by first buying an existing construction permit for a Gary, Indiana station which had been licensed as Channel 56 but never built, then swapping its channel allocations with WYIN - a PBS member station also licensed to Gary, Indiana. WYIN had been refused a Sears Tower transmitter location as Chicago has two existing PBS stations.
WPXE 55 ION	Kenosha, Wisconsin	Milwaukee	A station which came on the air in 1988 as an affiliate of the religious LeSEA network with low penetration into the general Milwaukee area and some local programming for Kenosha mixed within the general LeSEA schedule, WHKE (as it was known at the time) was purchased in 1995 by Paxson Communications to become the eventual Milwaukee station for the PAX network due to that network's strategy of buying low-rated outlying stations to quickly launch their network, and since then the station has drifted continuously north of their city of license. The station's analog tower is actually located in north-central Racine County^[6], just close enough to serve the northern reaches of the Milwaukee area and still provide a decent signal to Kenosha. The station has no Kenosha facilities and has their offices in the northern Milwaukee suburb of Glendale, while the station's digital transmitter is within the traditional tower site of all Milwaukee television stations on Milwaukee's northwest side^[7], thus WPXE is a station based out of Milwaukee which nominally serves a city thirty miles away from their station facilities, and has no Kenosha-specific programming (beyond passing mentions of Kenosha health care facilities on their only local program) on their schedule.
WPTZ 5 NBC	Plattsburgh	North Pole	WPTZ was originally licensed in 1954 to the North Pole, the closest tiny crossroads to its mountaintop transmitter site near Lake Placid/Adirondack State Park. Station has used "Plattsburgh - North Pole" or even "Montréal" as part of its on-air identity but the community of license, once chosen, is not easily modified. The station's owners have requested Plattsburgh as city of licence, so far without success.^[8] Plattsburgh already has WCFE (PBS 57) as its licensed station.
WVEA-TV 62 Univisión	Tampa	Venice, Florida	A Spanish-language station licensed to Venice, a community nearly 60 miles away from its Tampa studios and nearly 55 miles away from its Riverview transmitter site, in a Tampa suburb. WVEA originally was unprofitable English language independent WBSV, which served the Sarasota / Bradenton / Venice area. In 2000, Entravision acquired WBSV and in 2001 moved the transmitter from Venice to Riverview, increasing transmitter power and adopting its current Spanish-language « ¡vea! » identity (meaning "I see").
XETV 6 Fox	San Diego	Tijuana, Mexico	Mexican-owned station, fed from Entravision's California-based studio. San Diego (channels 8 and 10), Los Angeles (channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13) and Santa Barbara (channel 3) had already been allocated as early as 1952, with the remaining pair of VHF channels (6 and 12) allocated to Tijuana by Mexican authorities. The only means to add a third VHF TV broadcaster to San Diego without unacceptable interference was therefore to enter a local marketing agreement with Mexican-owned Televisa.
XHAS-TV 33 Telemundo	San Diego	Tecate, Baja California	A Spanish language broadcaster licensed to Mexico, this station is fed from studios in San Diego, USA.
XHDTV-TV 49 MyTV	San Diego	Tijuana, Mexico	This station is fed from the same San Diego studios as XETV Fox 6 but is licensed to Tijuana, Mexico.
XHITZ-FM 90.3	San Diego	Tijuana, Mexico	Finest City Broadcasting holds a programming and local marketing agreement with Mexican XHITZ, XETRA-FM and XHRM-FM, delivering programming from San Diego studios across the U.S.-Mexico border. Direct competitor XHMORE-FM, also licensed to Tijuana, markets itself as "Blazin' 98.9 FM, San Diego's official hip-hop station."
XHRIO-TV 2 Fox	Rio Grande Valley, Texas	Matamoros, Mexico	Like XETV, Fox X'RIO broadcasts via a Mexican-owned station fed from a US-based studio. The ATSC digital version of this broadcast is «Nuevo» KNVO-DT3, a subchannel of an Entravision-owned Spanish language Univisión station licensed to McAllen, Texas.