Spectrum News 1 Rochester (formerly Spectrum News Rochester and Time Warner Cable News Rochester) is an American cable news television channel owned by Charter Communications through its acquisition of Time Warner Cable in May 2016, as an affiliate of its Spectrum News slate of regional news channels. The channel provides 24-hour rolling news coverage focused primarily on Rochester, New York and the nearby Genesee River and Finger Lakes regions. The channel is carried on channel 9 in standard definition, as well as high definition, the latter of which is typically rendered automatically by those Charter Communications customers' high definition supported set-top boxes. Standard definition feeds come through to those customers who purchase Spectrum's Basic-Tier level of cable service. As of March 6, 2018, all customers are required to utilize digital receivers to view the station. These digital receivers come in two types: High Definition Multimedia Interface - HDMI - supported High Definition television digital receivers, and for those televisions void of HDMI connectivity, standard digital receivers. Higher tiered customers view the channel on digital channel 200 in high definition in Rochester. Channel 14 in other Charter Communications systems within the region fill in the extent of the area's coverage. As with the rest of its upstate sister news channels in upstate New York, Spectrum News Rochester shares news content with New York City-based NY1, Charter Communications' flagship regional cable news channel (which the provider carries on the digital tiers of its Upstate New York systems). History As an entertainment-formatted cable channel; expansion of news programming The channel launched on September 21, 1989 as a local origination channel using the fictional call sign "WGRC-TV" (standing for "Greater Rochester Cablevision," the area's major cable provider at the time); as such, it is the oldest channel among the Spectrum News networks and one of two that was not launched by Charter Communications or predecessor Time Warner Cable (the other being Spectrum News 1 of Kentucky, which launched under the ownership of Insight Communications). Originally carried on Greater Rochester Cablevision channel 5, the channel originally maintained a format modeled after general entertainment independent stations (such as that of WUHF [channel 31] prior to and after affiliating with Fox in October 1986). On weekdays, WGRC ran a mix of syndicated sitcoms and drama series (consisting of classic sitcoms from 9:00 a.m. to noon, family-oriented and then-relatively-recent off-network sitcoms from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. and a