WTRF 7 online - Television live

WTRF 7 Live Stream

WTRF 7 is the television station of the Wheeling-Steubenville market: a CBS affiliate that also carries ABC and MyNetworkTV programming for West Virginia's northern panhandle and Ohio's steel-country counties. Owned by Nexstar Media Group and broadcasting from studios on 16th Street in downtown Wheeling, it has served the Ohio Valley since 1953, and its newscasts also stream live online.

One newsroom serves two states: the market straddles the Ohio River, and 7News covers both banks of it - Wheeling and Weirton on the West Virginia side, Steubenville and Bridgeport on the Ohio side - for a region where local news still means the neighborhood.

7News and StormTracker 7

The schedule is built on 7News, with newscasts from morning to late night covering both sides of the river, and on StormTracker 7, the weather operation that tracks the Ohio Valley's storms and snow squalls from a region where the weather arrives off the Great Lakes plains. Sports runs deep in the valley's fabric: high school athletics under the Ohio Valley Athletic Conference - the conference that gives the region its identity - get the kind of coverage bigger markets reserve for professionals, from football Fridays to cheerleading championships, alongside the Pittsburgh and Columbus professional teams the valley follows.

The Valley's First Station

WTRF was the first station built specifically to serve Wheeling and Steubenville, signing on 24 October 1953 after Tri-City Broadcasting - owner of WTRF radio across the river in Bellaire, Ohio - merged its application with the WKWK group following the FCC's four-year licensing freeze. Channel 7 began as an NBC affiliate with secondary CBS and ABC programming, keeping the WTRF call letters when the radio stations were sold off in 1954. Two future network names started at the station in the 1970s: Faith Daniels, later an NBC and CBS anchor, and Bob Orr, later a CBS News correspondent; that same decade, cable systems as far away as Canton, Ohio, carried channel 7 for Cleveland Browns games that local stations had to black out. In January 1980 - a switch the general manager called the hardest decision he ever made - WTRF traded NBC for CBS, WTOV swapped to NBC, and the market's dial was redrawn.

Two States, One Dial

Today's WTRF is a rare three-network station: CBS on 7.1, ABC on 7.2 and MyNetworkTV on 7.3, with the transmitter in Bridgeport, Ohio, covering the panhandle and the valley. The ownership chain that began with Tri-City and Forward Communications passed through the leveraged-buyout era of the 1980s before arriving at Nexstar, and through it all channel 7 has remained the Ohio Valley's station - the signal that ties two states, one river and a hundred river towns together when the news, the weather or the OVAC championship comes to town.

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