WNYO-TV, virtual and UHF digital channel 49, is a MyNetworkTV-affiliated television station licensed to Buffalo, New York, United States. The station is owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group, as part of a duopoly with Fox affiliate WUTV (channel 29). The two stations share studios at 699 Hertel Avenue near Military Road in Buffalo; WNYO-TV's transmitter is located in Bennington, New York.
WNYO-TV can also be seen on cable television in parts of Canada; it is the MyNetworkTV affiliate on the digital tiers of cable providers in Canadian markets that carry stations from Buffalo, such as Toronto, and is also available in Kingston, Brockville, Cornwall, and Ottawa via a fiber optic line. However, neither WNYO-TV nor any other MyNetworkTV affiliate is available on cable in portions of Cattaraugus County, New York, which is served by Atlantic Broadband. This is due to financial demands as the must carry rule would normally apply in that area. In situations such as this, Atlantic usually picks up the station out of Erie, Pennsylvania, but that market has no MyNetworkTV affiliate of its own.
History
An early application for the Channel 49 license is on file for a WBBU-TV, which was granted a construction permit in 1966 but could not make it to air before the FCC purged the license from its database in 1970.
WNYB-TV signed on the air in September 1987, and was founded by the TVX Broadcast Group. Prior to signing on, it was sold to the Seymour Knox-Robert Swados group, original owners of the Buffalo Sabres NHL franchise, who had intended it to serve as an outlet (owned by Aud Television, LLC) to telecast the team's hockey games to Buffalo, Rochester, and the Niagara Peninsula region of Southern Ontario. This was in the era before the rise of regional sports cable networks such as MSG Network and Empire Sports Network. Financing of the transmitter was facilitated by the prospect of potentially using the five million watt signal for a late-night encrypted adult subscription service, which was available in many television markets in the Northeastern United States in the 1980s. However, the station never pursued this option due to the rapid growth of cable.
It had intended to sign on in the summer of 1987, but because many of the programs it was to carry would not become available to them until the fall, it rescheduled its debut until September of that year. WNYB-TV had secured the rights to Star Trek: The Next Generation, a major first-run syndicated program which debuted that fall. Due to the uncertainty that the station was going to be on the air by the fall of 1987, Paramount, the syndicator of the program (and the later buyer of the TVX chain) opted out of the deal with channel 49 and instead the program premiered on WUTV. The station's original slogan was "Buffalo's Superstation". In 1989, WUTV was one of several Fox affiliates nationwide unhappy with the network's weak primetime programming offerings. Fox then signed an affiliation agreement with WNYB-TV to become its new Buffalo affiliate in the fall of that year, while WUTV reverted to being an independent station full-time.
WNYB-TV did not stay with Fox for long, however; that same year, the station was sold to Norman Lear's Act III Broadcasting which almost immediately turned around and offered to buy WUTV from Citadel Communications. Citadel accepted the offer in 1989 and the sale was finalized in June 1990. Lear moved WNYB-TV's stronger programming, including its Fox affiliation, to WUTV. WNYB-TV was then sold to Tri-State Christian Television and began to carry religious programming full-time including programming from the Trinity Broadcasting Network. Grant Broadcasting acquired the dormant channel 26 license in Jamestown in 1995 and negotiated with Tri-State Christian Television to acquire WNYB-TV in exchange for channel 26 and cash, as well as a new broadcasting facility.
The station changed hands in the spring of 1996 and became the market's original WB affiliate, with Kids' WB programming airing late in the afternoons. TBN and other Christian programming continued to air outside of late afternoon and primetime hours until September 1996. At that point, TBN programming continued to air from 9 a.m. to noon, from midnight to 7 a.m. on weekdays, and until 3 p.m. on Sundays. The station also changed its call sign to the current WNYO-TV on October 24. Because channel 26 was still not operable, the Christian WNYB intellectual unit was unable to move there in 1996. Finally in January 1997, the Christian programming moved to channel 26, along with the WNYB call letters. Sinclair Broadcast Group purchased WNYO-TV in 2001, creating a duopoly with WUTV, which it had already owned since 1997.
On January 24, 2006, CBS Corporation (the parent company of UPN) and the Warner Bros. unit of Time Warner announced that The WB and UPN would be shut down. The two companies decided to replace both The WB and UPN with The CW (the name representing the first initial of its corporate parents), a new network that combined select programs from those networks with newer series.
On February 22, News Corporation announced that it would start up another new network called MyNetworkTV. This new service, which would be a sister to Fox, would be operated by Fox Television Stations and its syndication division Twentieth Television. MyNetworkTV was created in order to give UPN and WB stations that were not mentioned as becoming CW affiliates another option besides becoming an independent station, and to compete against The CW. WNYO-TV became an affiliate of the network when MyNetworkTV launched on September 5, 2006.
| TV stations in New York |
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| WWOR, Secaucus/New York City WVNC-LD2, Watertown/Norwood |
| TV stations in Western New York, including Buffalo and Niagara Falls |
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| WGRZ 2 (NBC) WIVB 4 (CBS) WKBW 7 (ABC) WNED 17 (PBS) WNLO 23 (CW) WVTT 25 (THIS) WNYB 26 (TCT) WUTV 29 (Fox) WDTB-LD 39 (Daystar) WNYO 49 (MNTV) WPXJ 51 (Ion) WBXZ-LP 56 (Cozi) WBBZ 67 (Ind.) |