WPRI-TV (channel 12) is a television station in Providence, Rhode Island, United States, affiliated with CBS and MyNetworkTV.

It is owned by Nexstar Media Group, which provides certain services to dual Fox/CW affiliate WNAC-TV (channel 64) under a local marketing agreement (LMA) with Mission Broadcasting.

The two stations share studios on Catamore Boulevard in East Providence, Rhode Island; WPRI-TV's transmitter is located on Pine Street in Rehoboth, Massachusetts.

It had originally planned to build a transmitter in Rehoboth, but legal disputes with town officials forced Cherry & Webb to find a site in Johnston, Rhode Island.

Channel 12's studios were originally located on the top floor of 24 Mason Street in Downtown Providence with its sister radio stations.

News personalities included Mort Blender and Walter Cryan while the beloved Hank Bouchard did a multitude of on-air duties.

WPRO-TV was then sold to Poole Broadcasting (owners of WJRT-TV in Flint, Michigan) on June 16, 1967; that sale was necessary because CapCities' purchase of KTRK-TV in Houston left it one VHF station over the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ownership limit at the time.

Poole retained ownership of channel 12 until 1977 when it sold its three television stations (WPRI, WJRT, and WTEN in Albany, New York) to Knight Ridder Broadcasting.

In 1989, Knight Ridder left the broadcasting business, selling WPRI and WTKR in Norfolk, Virginia, to Narragansett Television LP, a locally based firm.

Westinghouse already owned WBZ-TV in Boston; that station provided city-grade coverage to Providence itself, as well as New Bedford and Fall River, Massachusetts, and at least grade B coverage to the rest of Rhode Island, while WPRI's city-grade signal, like most of the other major Rhode Island stations, decently covers most of the Boston area.

As a result, CBS opted to keep WBZ-TV and sell WPRI to Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia) on July 1, 1996, after less than ten months of ownership.

Just months after the sale was announced, the FCC eliminated the requirement of a waiver for common ownership of television stations in adjacent markets with substantial grade B signal overlap.

In 2000, Clear Channel was forced to sell WPRI as a condition of being allowed to buy additional radio stations in the Providence market.

In October 2008, WPRI and sister station WALA-TV in Mobile, Alabama, relaunched websites through News Corporation's Fox Interactive Media, since spun off as the independent company known as EndPlay.

The other LIN TV-owned stations (irrespective of network affiliations) followed suit within two months ending the company's long partnership with WorldNow.

Most of the Web sites of the television stations Media General acquired since the announced merger with Young Broadcasting have also adopted this platform.

Shortly after Clear Channel took over the station, WPRI entered in a local marketing agreement (LMA) with Fox affiliate WNAC (then owned by Argyle Television).

Hearst was forced to trade WNAC together with WDTN in Dayton, Ohio (which had to be sold to alleviate an overlap conflict with WLWT in Cincinnati), to Sunrise Television in return for WPTZ in Plattsburgh, New York, WNNE in Hartford, Vermont, and KSBW in Salinas, California.

When Sunrise bought WPRI from Clear Channel in early 2001, WNAC was sold to LIN TV due to FCC regulations forbidding common ownership of two of the four highest-rated stations in the same market.

On October 22, 2010, WPRI began carrying TheCoolTV music video programming on its 12.2 subchannel; it was replaced by Bounce TV in July 2013.

This was to accommodate the move of MyRITV, the market's MyNetworkTV affiliate, from WNAC-DT2 to WPRI-DT2 as part of a broader shuffle where the programming and CW affiliation of WLWC's main channel was purchased by Nexstar several months before after WLWC's owner, OTA Broadcasting, sold their spectrum in the FCC's 2016 incentive auction and decided on a channel share with WPXQ-TV.

In 1996, WPRI began producing the market's first nightly prime time newscast at 10 p.m. on WNAC, then titled Eyewitness News at 10 on Fox Providence.

A third alternating host for a period of one year was found annually through an open audition in a contest titled The Rhode Show Search for a Star.

In addition, Eyewitness News This Morning on Fox Providence was extended to fill the hour previously occupied by The Rhode Show.

[14] WPRI and WNAC were the last stations in the market to upgrade their newscasts to high definition, though they were first to experiment with the format through promotional materials and debates during the election season in 2010.

[16] The station's signal is multiplexed: WPRI-TV received Federal Communications Commission (FCC) consent to discontinue regular programming on its analog signal, over VHF channel 12, on February 17, 2009,[18] the original date when full-power television stations in the United States were to transition from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate (which was later pushed back to June 12, 2009).