WSMV

About WSMV

WSMV-TV is the NBC affiliate for Nashville, Tennessee, broadcasting on virtual channel 4. Owned by Gray Media alongside low-power Telemundo affiliate WTNX-LD, the station signed on September 30, 1950, as WSM-TV — Nashville's first television station and the second in Tennessee — and has been an NBC affiliate for its entire history. Its call letters come from its founding owner's slogan, "We Shield Millions," with the "V" for "Vision" added to distinguish the TV station from WSM radio, the legendary home of the Grand Ole Opry. The station's studios and transmitter are on Knob Road in west Nashville. Its official website is wsmv.com.

Nashville's first television station

WSMV first signed on the air as WSM-TV on September 30, 1950, at 1:10 p.m. Central Time. It was Nashville's first television station and the second in Tennessee, behind fellow NBC affiliate WMCT in Memphis — then also on channel 4, which was forced to switch to channel 5 to avoid co-channel interference with the new Nashville outlet. The station was owned by WSM, Inc., a subsidiary of the locally based National Life and Accident Insurance Company, which also owned WSM radio (650 AM) and the original WSM-FM. The AM station was already renowned nationwide for broadcasts of the country music show The Grand Ole Opry, heard on the station since 1925. The television station took its call letters from National Life's slogan, "We Shield Millions." From its sign-on, channel 4 was an NBC affiliate, though it also carried secondary programming from CBS, DuMont, and ABC in television's early years, when single-station markets shared network feeds.

A microwave relay from Louisville

In its earliest years, WSM-TV faced a problem that seems quaint today: AT&T would not run telephone lines to deliver network programming to Nashville until there was another television station in town. The station's solution was to build a private microwave relay transmission from fellow NBC affiliate WAVE-TV in Louisville, Kentucky — the longest privately operated microwave relay link of its time. The relay carried NBC's programming south to Nashville until the network's own infrastructure caught up. The episode illustrates how improvised the early television business was: a major network affiliate in a state capital depended on a jury-rigged link to a station 175 miles away to put Today and prime time on the air.

The 1957 tower collapse

In 1957, the station attempted to build a larger tower in west Nashville, near Charlotte Avenue. During construction, the new tower's supporting wires failed, and the structure collapsed, taking the lives of several people. The tragedy shocked the city; some viewers learned of the accident almost instantly when an audio alert from the tower's broadcast equipment was heard during the afternoon program Modern Romances. Afterward, WSM-TV purchased its present property on Knob Road — farther west, and allowable because the Memphis station had moved from channel 4 to channel 5 — and built its tower in a forested section away from potential damage to life and property. The Knob Road site has been the station's home ever since.

Knob Road and the color era

WSM-TV's original studios were at 15th Avenue South and Compton Avenue in south Nashville, near what is now Belmont University. In 1963, National Life and Accident Insurance built new studios for WSM-TV and its AM radio sister adjacent to the transmission tower on Knob Road. Two years later, in 1965, WSM-TV became the first station in Nashville to broadcast in color. The Knob Road facility — studios, offices, and tower on one wooded campus — became one of the most storied broadcast plants in the South, and it remains the station's home today, shared with Gray's low-power Telemundo affiliate WTNX-LD. The station transmits digitally on VHF channel 10, mapped to virtual channel 4, with 60 kilowatts of power from a tower more than 400 meters above average terrain, and operates translators extending its reach across Middle Tennessee.

Country music on channel 4

The WSM stations' ties to Nashville's country music business made the Knob Road studios a recording site for network and syndicated programs featuring Nashville performers, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of these shows were packaged by Show Biz, Inc., a Nashville company that produced The Porter Wagoner Show, That Nashville Music, The Bill Anderson Show, Dolly!, and other programs seen across the South and rural Midwest. The connection ran deep: WSM radio's Grand Ole Opry was the most famous country music broadcast in America, and the television station's facilities and personnel were part of that ecosystem. In a nice symmetry, a young Pat Sajak worked as a WSM weatherman in the early 1970s before his Wheel of Fortune fame — and the Vanderbilt Television News Archive's earliest recordings of WSM-TV news, from 1973, feature Sajak anchoring local cut-ins.

The WSMV call letters

The station's ownership changed in 1981, when Gillett Broadcasting, operated by George N. Gillett Jr., bought WSM-TV on November 3 and changed the call sign to WSMV the same day — officially modified to WSMV-TV in July 1982. The new calls let channel 4 keep trading on the well-known WSM identity while separating it from its former radio sisters, which had been sold to Gaylord Entertainment. The change was required by an FCC rule then in effect forbidding TV and radio stations in the same city with different owners from sharing call letters. American General, the Houston-based insurer that had taken over National Life's parent company, had sold off the broadcasting interests along with the Grand Ole Opry and Opryland USA, keeping only the insurance business. WSMV was sold again on June 8, 1989, to Cook Inlet Television Partners, a subsidiary of the Alaska Native corporation Cook Inlet Region, Inc.

The Meredith years

Cook Inlet sold WSMV to the Meredith Corporation on January 5, 1995. The timing had a notable consequence: the purchase was announced after Meredith had finalized a major affiliation deal with CBS covering several of its stations, so WSMV — an NBC affiliate — was not part of that deal, and it became the only NBC affiliate in Meredith's portfolio, a distinction it held until the 2021 sale. Under Meredith, the station branded itself "News 4" and maintained one of the strongest news operations in the market. In 2009, its master control operations were hubbed at Meredith's Atlanta station WGCL-TV. A 2015 proposal for Media General to acquire Meredith would have forced a sale of either WSMV or Media General's WKRN in Nashville to satisfy FCC ownership rules; the deal was terminated when Nexstar agreed to acquire Media General instead, and WSMV remained with Meredith.

The Gray Media acquisition

On May 3, 2021, Gray Television announced its intent to purchase Meredith Corporation's local media division for $2.7 billion; the sale closed on December 1, 2021, bringing WSMV into Gray Media. Gray immediately repositioned the station from "News 4" to "WSMV 4" with new graphics, and in 2022 launched a localized imaging campaign reviving the "Nashville's Station" nickname, inviting viewers to "Come On Back" after years of ratings losses. In December 2023, the NBC peacock was removed from the station's logo as part of a company-wide Gray initiative to strip network marks from affiliate logos. The acquisition reunited WSMV with fellow former Meredith stations across Gray's portfolio and gave the Nashville outlet access to Gray's Washington news bureau, its InvestigateTV unit, and its regional sports and digital resources.

A news powerhouse

WSMV-TV broadcasts 53 hours of locally produced newscasts each week — nine hours each weekday and four hours each on Saturdays and Sundays — the highest local newscast output of any broadcast station in the Nashville market. The station's news department was the first in the United States to use satellite photographs, beginning in 1964. From the mid-1970s through the 1990s, channel 4 built a nationally recognized news operation that won Peabody Awards and other honors for in-depth and investigative reporting under news directors including Mike Kettenring. The station's First Alert weather team has been certified by WeatherRate as Nashville's most accurate forecast for multiple years running, and its coverage of the 2021 Waverly floods earned an Edward R. Murrow Award. For most of the last two decades, WSMV has been a strong runner-up to WTVF in the Nashville ratings, generally leading in the city's suburbs and outlying rural areas where the station's WSM heritage runs deepest.

Sports on channel 4

As Nashville's NBC affiliate, WSMV is the local home of Sunday Night Football, including games of the market's NFL team, the Tennessee Titans, a role it has held since 2006. The station also aired Nashville Predators games through NBC's NHL contract, including the team's 2017 Stanley Cup Finals appearance. From 1987 until 2002, channel 4 was the primary Nashville home of syndicated Southeastern Conference football and men's basketball from Jefferson Pilot Sports, carrying Vanderbilt Commodores games across the region. Today, the station is the flagship of the Tennessee Valley Sports and Entertainment Network, which rebroadcasts classic Raycom Sports SEC programming on the station's DT2 subchannel. The sports lineage — from SEC syndication to the Titans to the Predators' Cup run — has made channel 4 a central part of Middle Tennessee's sports life.

Seventy-five years of channel 4

From its 1950 sign-on as WSM-TV, through the microwave-relay improvisations of its infancy, the 1957 tower tragedy, the color era on Knob Road, the country-music television boom, and ownership by National Life, Gillett, Cook Inlet, Meredith, and Gray, WSMV has been Nashville's NBC station without interruption for 75 years. The "We Shield Millions" slogan that gave it its calls, the Opry heritage it once shared with WSM radio, and the Knob Road campus that has housed it since 1963 are threads that run through the entire history of television in Middle Tennessee. As WSMV 4, it remains the market's news leader by hours and a station whose identity is inseparable from the city it has served since television's earliest days.