WECT

WECT (channel 6) is a television station in Wilmington, North Carolina, United States, affiliated with NBC.

The three stations share studios on Shipyard Boulevard in Wilmington; WECT's transmitter is located near Winnabow, North Carolina.

However, WWAY opted to affiliate with the much weaker ABC, forcing WECT to shoehorn NBC and CBS onto its schedule until the 1970s, when cable arrived in the Wilmington market.

At one point, this station was carried on cable systems in the Triangle region of North Carolina (Raleigh, Durham, Fayetteville, and Chapel Hill) for a time when NBC did not have a full-time affiliate in that market.

[5] Due to its longstanding popularity, WECT is still carried on cable systems in the eastern portion of the Triangle market, including Fayetteville and Southern Pines.

However, FCC duopoly rules forced Raycom to spin off WWAY to Morris Multimedia as a condition of the Raycom–Liberty merger.

The southern and western portions of the Florence–Myrtle Beach market were served by another Raycom station, WIS in Columbia.

On August 8, 2008, Raycom signed-on WMBF-TV, a new digital-only NBC affiliate in Myrtle Beach covering the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing as part of its first network programming.

[11] Due to FCC regulations, WECT disappeared from most cable systems in the Florence–Myrtle Beach market when WMBF signed on.

The cash-and-stock merger transaction valued at $3.6 billion – in which Gray shareholders would acquire preferred stock currently held by Raycom – made WECT a sister station to fellow NBC affiliate WITN-TV in Washington.

On August 31, 2008, WECT became Wilmington's first television outlet to upgrade local news production to high definition level and the broadcasts on WSFX were included in the change.

All newscasts on WSFX air from WECT's primary set but with modified duratrans indicating the Fox-branded shows.

The station's signal is multiplexed: Prior to September 26, 2012, WECT-DT2 aired a 24-hour local weather channel with the branding "WECT Plus".

The subchannel also aired repeats of the main channel's weeknight 6 and 11 p.m. newscasts as well as local traffic and travel information.

WECT and WSFX headquarters in Wilmington, North Carolina
WECT and NBC logo on side of studio building
WECT logo from 2001 to 2020. An earlier variant was used from 1995 to 2001.
The WECT and WSFX shared studio in Wilmington, North Carolina