December 1, 2008, WECT returned to the Time Warner Cable lineup in Lumberton, but was placed in the digital tier. This station is one of the few NBC affiliates that refused to air Poker After Dark. In 2012, Raycom gave the station's defunct analog transmitter site to the Green Beret Foundation. On September 20, 2012, the tower, which was built in 1969 and was among the tallest man-made structures east of the Mississippi River, was imploded. At the time it was the tallest-ever man-made structure leveled via explosive demolition. Plans called for the scrap metal and the site to be sold to benefit the foundation. Sale to Gray Television On June 25, 2018, Atlanta-based Gray Television announced it had reached an agreement to merge with Raycom, with Gray as the surviving company. 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. WITN-TV and WECT had briefly been sister stations when Raycom was formed in 1997. However, Raycom was forced to sell WITN to Gray in 1997 because WITN's signal has city-grade quality in the northern portion of the Wilmington market. At the time, the FCC normally did not allow one company to own two stations with overlapping signals, and would not even consider a waiver for a city-grade overlap. The sale was approved on December 20 and completed on January 2, 2019. Programming Syndicated programming Syndicated programming on WECT includes Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy! (both of which formerly aired on WWAY until 1992), The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and Live with Kelly and Ryan. News operation On September 22, 2003, through a news share agreement, WECT began producing a nightly half-hour prime time newscast on WSFX (Fox 26 News at 10 (now Fox Wilmington News at 10)). This was eventually joined by an sixty-minute extension of WECT's weekday morning show on September 13, 2006, called Carolina in the Morning on Fox 26 (now Carolina in the Morning on Fox Wilmington), seen from 7 until 8 on WSFX offering an alternative to the national morning shows seen on the market's big three network-affiliated stations. 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. At some point in