WBNG-TV (channel 12) is a television station in Binghamton, New York, United States, affiliated with CBS and CW+. The station is owned by Gray Television, and maintains studios on Columbia Drive in Johnson City and a transmitter on Ingraham Hill Road in the town of Binghamton. History The station signed on December 1, 1949, as WNBF-TV and was originally owned by Clark Associates Inc. along with WNBF radio (1290 AM and 98.1 FM, now WHWK). At its launch, WNBF carried programs from all four American television networks at the time (CBS, DuMont, NBC, and ABC) since it was the market's first television outlet to launch. For many of its early years, WNBF was the only station available to viewers in the nearby Scranton–Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, market as set owners pointed their roof-top antennas north towards Binghamton. The station subsequently lost its affiliations with DuMont in 1956 after the network's collapse, and the others when new UHF stations arrived in town: NBC on WINR-TV (channel 40, now WICZ-TV) in 1957; and ABC to WBJA-TV (channel 34, now WIVT) in 1962. The station was a major beneficiary of a quirk in the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s plan for allocating stations. In the early days of broadcast television, there were twelve VHF channels available and 69 UHF channels (later reduced to 55 in 1983). The VHF bands were more desirable because they carried longer distances. Since there were only twelve VHF channels available, there were limitations as to how closely the stations could be spaced. After the FCC's Sixth Report and Order ended the license freeze and opened the UHF band in 1952, it devised a plan for allocating VHF licenses. Under this plan, almost all of the country would be able to receive two commercial VHF channels plus one noncommercial channel. Most of the rest of the country ("1/2") would be able to receive a third VHF channel. Other areas would be designated as "UHF islands" since they were too close to larger cities for VHF service. The "2" networks became CBS and NBC, "+1" represented non-commercial educational stations, and "1/2" became ABC (which was the weakest network usually winding up with the UHF allocation where no VHF was available). However, the Binghamton market was sandwiched between Syracuse (channels 3, 8 (later 5), and 9) and Utica (channel 13, later 2) to the north, Elmira (a UHF island) to the west, Scranton–Wilkes-Barre (a