WCSH News Center online - Television live

WCSH News Center Live Stream

WCSH - NEWS CENTER Maine - is Maine's NBC affiliate: the Pine Tree State's oldest television station, on the air since 20 December 1953 and broadcasting from Congress Square in downtown Portland. Owned by the Tegna subsidiary of Nexstar Media Group and paired with Bangor sister station WLBZ, whose simulcasts spread the newscasts statewide, it has generally been Maine's highest-rated news station since the mid-1980s, and its signal also streams live online.

The station's roots go back further than television itself: WCSH radio was one of NBC's charter affiliates in 1926 and carried the network's very first radio program - a lineage channel 6 inherited when it signed on as Portland's NBC outlet.

The Station Mainers Turn To

NEWS CENTER Maine covers the state from Portland with newscasts from morning to late night, with WLBZ simulcasting most of them for Bangor and Down East - an arrangement that effectively gives one newsroom a statewide reach. Storm coverage is the station's calling card: when nor'easters roll off the Atlantic toward the coast, Maine's channel 6 is the signal viewers watch. The community-service tradition runs just as deep, with Coats and Toys for Kids, Project Heat and Buddy to Buddy connecting Mainers year after year - a mission the station describes as keeping all of Maine connected through in-depth storytelling and direct contact on digital platforms.

From the Congress Square Hotel

WCSH-TV signed on 20 December 1953 from the Congress Square Hotel in downtown Portland, the radio studio converted for television and a former storage room turned into a kitchen set for cooking shows. Founder Henry P. Rines's Maine Broadcasting System ran an ambitious local lineup early - from Your Home and You and Living Down East to the teen dance program The Dave Astor Show - and by 1955 the station was broadcasting eighteen hours a day. In 1958 the family bought Bangor's channel 2, planting the seed of today's two-station NEWS CENTER. The move to modern studios at 1 Congress Square came in 1977, and the family sold to Gannett in 1997, from which the station passed into Tegna and then under Nexstar's umbrella. Its protective streak over local news became legend: in 1994, WCSH preempted more NBC sports programming than any of the network's 213 affiliates - thirty-eight percent of it - to protect its 6 p.m. newscast.

A Statewide Signal

The transmitter on Winn Mountain in Sebago carries channel 6 across southern Maine, while the WLBZ simulcast and the NEWS CENTER brand tie the whole state to one newsroom. For a market that measures communities in miles of coastline and acres of woods, that reach is the point: whether the story is a Portland city hall debate, a Bangor paper mill or a storm line stretching from Kittery to Caribou, NEWS CENTER Maine is the channel the Pine Tree State grew up with - and the one it still watches when the weather turns.

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