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Inbroadcasting,sister stations orsister channels areradio ortelevision stations operated by the same company, either bydirect ownership or through amanagement agreement.[1]
Radio sister stations will often have differentformats, and sometimes one station is on theAM band while another is on theFM band. Conversely, several types of sister-station relationships exist in television; stations in the same city will usually beaffiliated with differenttelevision networks (often one with a major network and the other with a secondary network), and may occasionally shifttelevision programs between each other when local events require one station to interrupt its network feed.
Sister stations in separate (but often nearby) cities owned by the same company may or may not share a network affiliation. For example,WNYW andWWOR-TV, inNew York City andSecaucus, New Jersey, are both owned byFox Corporation. WNYW is a Foxowned-and-operated station; WWOR-TV is a MyNetworkTV owned-and-operated station.WPSG in Philadelphia andKBCW in San Francisco were the flagship stations ofThe CW until 2023 and are owned byCBS Television Stations. In addition, stations in different cities affiliated with the same network, but not sharing an ownership tie, may refer to each other informally as sister stations.
Sister networks orsister channels, in many cases, are cable or satellite channels which are launched to either broadcast series which either premiered on the main network but has been moved out of the higher-priority schedule (such asTV Land or Boomerang), fulfill a specific niche of content which would not be fulfilled on the main network (such as theNick Jr. Channel[2] orNicktoons) or broadcast to a wider audience than the main network (such asCNN International orAl Jazeera English). However, in other cases, these cable or satellite channels may only share common ownership.
The establishment and proliferation of sister networks on cable, satellite and internet providers has become easier and more commercially profitable over the history of such media venues.