WEFS

WEFS (channel 68) is a television station in Cocoa, Florida, United States, serving the Orlando area. The station is owned by Eastern Florida State College (EFSC) and maintains studios at the EFSC campus in Cocoa; its transmitter is located on Brown Road near Christmas, Florida.

The station's history begins with the activation of Cocoa's non-commercial educational channel 18 as WRES, a church-owned, family-oriented television station that began limited telecasting in June 1987. Three months later, Press Broadcasting acquired WRES and immediately agreed to donate it to Cocoa-based Brevard Community College. While the station switched to offering primarily instructional television programming including telecourses, Press set in motion a series of channel improvements. It had owned WMOD in Melbourne but found that its signal hindered it from competing in Orlando. The donation of the channel 18 license was contingent on permitting a swap with another station. That station, WKCF, began broadcasting on channel 68 in 1988. After objections from several Orlando TV stations, WKCF moved to channel 18 in October 1991; simultaneously, WRES switched to channel 68 and changed its call sign to WBCC. The move permitted both stations to upgrade their signals.

At the start of 2002, WBCC became a secondary PBS station. With the arrival of digital television, it began providing subchannels with content from the University of Central Florida (UCF) and Brevard Public Schools. The presence of WBCC and WDSC-TV in the market eroded viewer support for Orlando's primary PBS station, WMFE-TV, and contributed to financial exigencies there. In 2011, that station ceased airing PBS programming while a sale was pending. Brevard Community College partnered with UCF to launch "WUCF TV", the new primary PBS station for Central Florida, as WBCC's main channel on July 1, 2011. This partnership was unwound the next year when UCF purchased the WMFE-TV license and transmitter facility, making WUCF-TV a station in its own right. WBCC programming had continued on a subchannel throughout the run of "WUCF TV" on channel 68, minus PBS shows, and returned to the main channel as PBS programming moved to channel 24. The station changed its call sign in 2013 as part of the renaming of Brevard Community College as Eastern Florida State College. Its local programming includes EFSC athletic and official events and public affairs shows for Brevard County and the Space Coast.