WMBF-TV (channel 32) is a television station licensed to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, United States, serving as the NBC affiliate for the Grand Strand and Pee Dee regions of South Carolina. Owned by Gray Television, the station maintains studios on Frontage Road East (along US 17) in Myrtle Beach, with a secondary studio and news bureau on West Cheves Street in Florence; its transmitter is located on Flossie Road in Bucksville, South Carolina.
Among the youngest full-power major network affiliates in the United States, WMBF-TV began broadcasting in 2008 under Raycom Media, which had inherited the construction permit from Liberty Corporation. Its construction gave the region its first in-market NBC affiliate, replacing cable and over-the-air broadcasts of two co-owned stations in adjacent markets, and a third source of local news coverage. Due to technical restrictions, WMBF's over-the-air signal is not viewable in much of the market's inland portion, including Florence, the market's second-largest city (in the analog era before Myrtle Beach's growth, where most of the market's stations were concentrated in). A network of five low-power translators extends WMBF's signal to much of this area for viewers without access to cable or satellite.
History
In 1984, Moore Broadcast Industries petitioned the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to add channel 32 to the table of allotments at Myrtle Beach, specifying the station had to be located southwest of town to protect two unused allotments in North Carolina, at High Point and Wilmington. Moore filed for the channel alongside seven other groups, but only three were still in the running in November 1986, when the FCC gave the nod to Coastal Carolina Broadcasting Company, a group of residents of Conway. Coastal Carolina's proposed station got a call sign, WCRD, but little else, being unable to secure financing.
The channel assignment lay fallow with no activity until 1996, when the FCC opened a last-chance window for filings to build new TV stations before turning the channels over to possible use for digital television facilities. An application was made by Cosmos Broadcasting, the broadcasting subsidiary of the Liberty Corporation and owner of WIS in Columbia. The president of Cosmos told The Sun News that the odds were "fairly long" for Cosmos to actually be granted the channel.
In October 2005, the FCC granted Liberty the permit. Two months earlier, though, Liberty had announced its sale to Raycom Media in a 15-station, $987 million transaction. Under the radar, the deal included the construction permit for channel 32 in Myrtle Beach. The Liberty purchase by Raycom united WIS with WECT in Wilmington. These stations had, for decades, served as the default NBC affiliates for northeastern South Carolina, one of the few areas of the country without full service from the Big Three television networks. Both stations were on the Myrtle Beach cable system when it debuted in 1962; said cable system was co-owned with WIS. Beginning in 1995, WIS and Time Warner Cable had been engaged in a joint venture to produce a customized feed of the station for the Florence area, "WIS–Florence", complete with its own advertising sales staff.
Facilities were approved in early 2007, and it was announced at that time that the station would replace WIS and WECT on regional cable systems. Raycom selected a building formerly used by cell phone company SunCom on Frontage Road and began construction later that year. For Raycom, the construction of WMBF served several goals. Because the digital television transition was looming—with the Wilmington stations, including WECT, part of a pilot switchover in September 2008—the Myrtle Beach station, built as a digital-only facility from the outset, would fill in gaps in coverage after WECT's analog signal shut down. It also would allow Raycom for the first time to sell advertising in the rapidly growing Grand Strand area and give NBC its first in-market affiliate for Myrtle Beach and Florence.
The transmitter was turned on in late July 2008, and the station began programming at 11:59 p.m. on August 7, with NBC welcoming the station on-air the following day on Today, NBC Nightly News, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien. The sign-on of WMBF-TV occurred in time for the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics. The construction of WMBF cost Raycom an estimated $10 million.
Sale to Gray Television
In June 2018, Atlanta-based Gray Television announced it had reached an agreement to merge with Raycom in a transaction valued at $3.6 billion. The sale was approved on December 20 and completed on January 2, 2019.