WABI-TV was Maine's first television station. On January 25, 1953, it began transmitting an analog signal on VHF channel 5. The Community Broadcasting Service, which was created in 1949 when former Governor Horace Hildreth acquired WABI radio, owned it (910 AM, now WTOS; and 97.1 FM, now WBFB). Murray Carpenter oversaw it in its early years. The station was an NBC primary affiliate with subsidiary connections with the other three major networks at the time (CBS, ABC, and DuMont). In 1955, it lost CBS to WTWO (channel 2), which Carpenter had created. It quickly lost DuMont when that network went down. When Carpenter sold WTWO to the Rines-Thompson family in 1959, the new owners renamed the station WLBZ-TV and switched affiliations with WABI-TV, making channel 5 the major CBS affiliate. The two networks then began to share ABC content that WABI had previously reserved for themselves. This stopped when WEMT (channel 7, now WVII-TV) signed on and took up the affiliation in 1965. WABI was also temporarily linked with the NTA Film Network in the late 1950s.