WCNC-TV online - Television live

WCNC-TV Live Stream

WCNC is Charlotte's NBC affiliate: a station whose history reads like a broadcasting novel - founded by a dentist, rescued from receivership by Ted Turner, renamed and sold to fund the launch of CNN, and eventually settled into a news operation covering North Carolina's largest city. Owned by the Tegna subsidiary of Nexstar Media Group and broadcasting from the Wood Ridge Center office complex just east of the Billy Graham Library, channel 36 pairs NBC's national programming with local newscasts, and its signal also streams live online.

On cable, Charlotte watches channel 36 as channel 6 - one of those mapping quirks older viewers never forget - and in a three-station news race against WSOC and WBTV, WCNC has spent decades as the scrappy competitor with the interesting backstory.

The Charlotte Newsroom

WCNC covers the Charlotte metropolitan area - the city, the surrounding counties, and a market that stretches from the Piedmont into the foothills - with newscasts through the day and a weather desk working the region's weather mix: hurricane remnants tracking inland from the coast, winter ice storms, and the summer thunderstorms of the Carolina Piedmont. The station has generally ranked third in Charlotte's news ratings, a position it has fought from since its modern news operation took shape - competing against two heritage VHF powerhouses with a UHF signal and, more often than the bigger stations would like, the stories they missed.

The Turner Years

Channel 36's modern history began 9 July 1967, when WCTU-TV - the U stood for UHF, because Charlotte's educational station objected to the original WCTI call letters - signed on as a low-budget independent founded by a Charlotte dentist. Debts put the station into receivership, and the buyer who pulled it out was a young Atlanta broadcaster named Ted Turner. As WRET-TV, the station thrived through the 1970s and became Charlotte's NBC affiliate in 1978 when WSOC-TV switched to ABC. Turner sold the renamed station to Westinghouse Broadcasting in 1979 - raising the capital that launched CNN - and as WPCQ-TV, the Group W years were lean: the station preempted network programming so freely that even the NBC Nightly News sometimes failed to air. New ownership arrived in 1984, the Providence Journal Company in 1988, and the current call letters in 1989; Belo bought the station in 1996, Gannett in 2013, Tegna was spun off in 2015, and Nexstar took over in 2026.

Wood Ridge and the Gaston Tower

Today's WCNC broadcasts from studios in the Wood Ridge Center off Billy Graham Parkway - an address that could only belong to Charlotte - with the transmitter in north-central Gaston County and two low-power translators, W30CR-D in Biscoe and W24AY-D in Lilesville, extending the signal across the central Piedmont. Nexstar's Charlotte cluster includes Fox affiliate WJZY and CW outlet WMYT, making channel 36 one of three stations under one corporate roof in the market - and the live stream carries its newscasts and NBC's schedule to screens across the Carolinas and beyond.

WCNC-TV Watch Live Streaming now online