The station operated on UHF channel 59 from studios in the Hotel Lafayette in Buffalo. WBES-TV, the second UHF station (and third TV station overall) in Western New York, was very short-lived, signing on September 29, 1953 and shutting down for the last time on December 19 of the same year. An independent station for its entire existence, WBES-TV was plagued by technical and financial problems, the primary factor in the station's failure. Its efforts to affiliate with a network were rejected, as the networks were waiting on the remaining VHF allocations to be built.[2]
Tom Jolls, at the time a radio personality at Lockport's WUSJ, was one of the station's personalities. He would eventually return to television a decade later, first with WBEN-TV (channel 4, now WIVB-TV), then more permanently with WKBW-TV (channel 7), where he spent 24 years as a weatherman.[3]
After WBES-TV was shut down, Buffalo was left with two stations, market leader WBEN-TV and fellow UHF upstart WBUF-TV (channel 17); WGR-TV (channel 2) signed on for the very first time on August 14, 1954, using WBES-TV's broadcast tower.[2]
In 1955, WBES-TV's channel 59 allocation was sold to Frontier Television,[4] who in 1957 petitioned the Federal Communications Commission to move the allocation to channel 29.[5] Planned as WNYT-TV,[6] the new station would have operated out of the studios of WBUF and used equipment donated by that station.[5] The FCC granted the move, though Frontier would never bring it to air after its chairman determined that competing against VHF channels was not economically feasible;[4] channel 29 eventually made it to air as WUTV in 1970.
