"[2] The Federal Communications Commission interprets this as requiring that every broadcast station "be licensed to the principal community or other political subdivision which it primarily serves.
[7] The former requirement to (in most cases) maintain an official main studio within 25 miles of the community's geographic center was discontinued in December 2017 when the regulation was amended.
In many cases, the use of centralcasting and broadcast automation has greatly weakened the role and importance of manual control by staff at the nominal local station studio facilities.
Exceptions to these rules have been made by regulators, primarily on a case-by-case basis, to deal with "satellite stations": transmitters which are licensed to comply with the technical requirements of full service broadcast facilities and have their own independent call signs and communities of license but are used simply as full-power broadcast translators to rebroadcast another station.
[12] By 1969, the same issues had spread to FM licensing; instead of building transmitters in the community to nominally be served, applicants would often seek to locate the tower site at least halfway to the next major city.
Outlying communities would find their small-town local stations sold to outsiders, who would then attempt to change the community of license to a suburb of the nearest major city, move transmitter locations or remove existing local content from broadcasts in an attempt to move into the larger city.
)[14] The same is true for WJSU, which served East Alabama with local news until the station was merged into a triplex to form ABC 33/40 which focuses its coverage on the central part of the state.
The Commission is required by Section 307(b) of the Communications Act "to provide a fair, efficient, and equitable distribution of radio service" to "the several States and communities."
The FCC cannot simply permit radio stations to relocate from rural areas to well-served urban markets without violating that mandate.
In some cases, such as Jeannette, Pennsylvania-licensed WPKD-TV 19, the FCC has waived this requirement; the station claimed that retaining an existing transmitter site 25.6 miles southeast of its new community of license of Jeannette would be in compliance with the commission's minimum distance separation requirements (avoiding interference to co-channel WOIO 19 Shaker Heights).
In 2015, the station was allowed by the FCC to move their city of license to Collinsville, Illinois, and have a transmitter in St. Louis proper with a power decrease.
For instance, the Canadian radio station CFNY-FM 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.
For instance, for a short time while resolving a license conflict and ownership transaction in 1989, the current day KCAL-TV in Los Angeles was licensed to the little-known southeast suburb of Norwalk, California, with the station's identifications at the time only vocally mentioning the temporary city of license in a rushed form, with Norwalk barely receiving any visual mention on the station; at no time were any station assets actually based in Norwalk, nor was public affairs or news programming adjusted to become Norwalk-centric over that of Los Angeles and Southern California.
Often, a station will keep a tiny outlying community in its licensing and on-air identity long after the original rationale for choosing that location is no longer truly applicable.
This process is subject to various political and bureaucratic restrictions, based on considerations including the number of existing stations in the area.
The definition of a "community" also comes into play when a broadcaster wants to take a station away from a tiny hamlet like North Pole, New York, whose population is in decline.
The once-tiny FM stations would often then be sold, increased (where possible) to much-higher power and used to serve a huge mainstream audience in the larger metropolitan area.
This occasionally left stations with a distant mountaintop (or its nearest small crossroads) as the historical city of license, even though the audience was elsewhere.
Often, a license for a new station will not be available in a community, either because a regulatory agency was only willing to accept new applications within specified narrow timeframes or because there are no suitable vacant channels.
This may provide access to less restrictive broadcast regulation or represent a means to use local marketing agreements or adjacent-market licenses to circumvent limits on the number of stations under common ownership.
Occasionally, a prospective broadcaster could obtain one of these coveted positions by acquiring an existing station or permit in an adjacent community - although in some cases this meant a move out-of-state.
A new network or station group will often enter a market after all of the most valuable available frequencies (such as the analogue VHF TV assignments in major cities) are already taken.
CKGN-TV, Ontario's original "Global Television Network" repeater chain, signed on in 1974 in an already densely-packed stretch of the beaten-path Windsor-Quebec corridor in which few desirable channels were available.
On anything less than a huge rooftop antenna, the station is unwatchable — but, even if the underlying over-the-air signal was not valuable, the corresponding cable television slots in the various communities it was almost serving were.