Питтсфилд және Албани аймағының 51-арнасы: WNYA телеарнасының тарихы

MyNetworkTV affiliate in Pittsfield, Massachusetts

WNYA (channel 51) is a television station licensed to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, United States, serving New York's Capital District as an affiliate of MyNetworkTV. It is owned by Hubbard Broadcasting alongside Albany licensed NBC affiliate WNYT (channel 13). Both stations share studios on North Pearl Street in Menands (with an Albany postal address), while WNYA's transmitter is located on the Helderberg Escarpment west of New Salem. The station uses its main cable channel position of 4 on Charter Spectrum and Verizon Fios for marketing purposes as My 4 Albany, only mentioning their actual channel number on air during maintenance sign off disclosures. Despite Pittsfield being WNYA's city of license, the station maintains no physical presence there.

What today is WNYA can indirectly trace its history to WVUW, an un built station on channel 51 in Pittsfield. WVUW was granted a construction permit in 1984, but was deleted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1990. In October 1996, Pappas Telecasting applied for a new permit for this allocation; however, in 2001, the FCC placed the channel up for auction. In addition to Pappas, which by then planned to use the station as an Azteca América affiliate, bidders included Hubbard Broadcasting, Equity Broadcasting, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, and Venture Technologies Group. The FCC granted the construction permit and the WNYA call sign to Venture a year later. To accommodate the new WNYA, WNYT moved its Adams translator, which had broadcast on channel 51 since 1984, to channel 38.

In February 2003, Venture Technologies signed a joint sales agreement (JSA) with Freedom Communications, then owner of CBS affiliate WRGB (channel 6); this allowed WNYA to operate from WRGB's studios in Niskayuna. Soon afterward, WNYA secured an affiliation with UPN, replacing "WEDG TV," a cable only station operated as a partnership of WXXA TV (channel 23) and Time Warner Cable. On May 22, 2003, Venture purchased WVBX LP (channel 39) in Easton from Vision 3 Broadcasting, a station that a year earlier had been granted a construction permit to upgrade to class A service and move to channel 15 from a transmitter in the Helderberg Mountains in New Scotland, in effect moving WVBX to Albany. Venture took channel 39 off the air that June, built the channel 15 facility, gave it the call letters WNYA CA on June 30, 2003, and announced that the station would serve as a WNYA repeater; this created the unusual circumstance of a repeater station older than its parent station, as WVBX had signed on in 1997 as part of a network of low power stations based at WVBG LP (channel 25) in Albany, which itself served as the Capital District's UPN affiliate from 1998 until the launch of "WEDG TV" in 2000. On September 1, 2003, WNYA launched using the branding "UPN Capital Region." On February 22, News Corporation announced that it would start up another new broadcast television network called MyNetworkTV; on March 9, it was announced that WNYA would join this network. After having not branded with a channel number during its UPN affiliation, the station chose to call itself "My TV 4 Albany" after its channel position on Time Warner Cable systems. Ironically, nowhere in Berkshire County, Massachusetts is WNYA currently on channel 4; in North Adams, that channel is the spot where Boston's CBS affiliate WBZ TV is located. After MyNetworkTV's launch on September 5, 2006, WNYA aired the last two weeks of UPN programming from 1 to 3 a. m. from Tuesday to Saturday. A few months after the affiliation change, on December 5, 2006, Freedom Communications purchased WCWN from Tribune, in effect giving it control over three stations in the Capital District. In February 2007, the joint sales agreement with WRGB was terminated, and WNYA moved to a facility in Rotterdam that formerly housed WMHT FM TV. In December 2007, WNYA reached an agreement to carry the New York Yankees' over the air television package, which had previously been carried on WXXA TV. The station hired Dan Murphy, a former WTEN (channel 10) sports anchor and WOFX (980 AM) host, to host a local pregame show for Yankee telecasts and other local sports broadcasts. On April 18, 2008, WNYA launched its high definition channel on Time Warner Cable in Albany, even though it was not able to transmit its digital signal over the air until 2009. This coincided with the first Yankee baseball broadcast it had the rights to. WNYA switched to digital broadcasting as part of the transition on June 12, 2009. The Albany repeater, WNYA CA, had a construction permit to perform a "flash cut" to a low power digital signal; due to its Class A status, it was not mandated to make the transition until 2015. Around April 20, 2011, WNYA launched its first digital subchannel in the form of Tribune Broadcasting's Antenna TV over Channel 51.2. The new subchannel also began to be simulcast on WNYA CA in place of WNYA's main programming.

On February 25, 2013, Hubbard Broadcasting announced that it would purchase WNYA to form a duopoly with its local NBC affiliate WNYT, for $2.3 million, pending FCC approval. As the Capital Region does not have enough full power stations to legally permit a duopoly, Hubbard sought a failed station waiver to acquire the station; an avenue that rival CBS affiliate WRGB had used in purchasing CW affiliate WCWN in 2006. Venture had put WNYA up for sale in 2009, but no other potential buyers came forward. The sale did not include class A station WNYA CA, which remained with Venture Technologies. Under a clause of the sale of WNYA that required WNYA CA to use a new call sign that does not feature the letters "N" or "Y," The sale was consummated on July 15. WEPT CA dropped its simulcast of WNYA DT2 and switched to AMGTV in September 2013, ending its association with WNYA. On December 31, 2015, WNYA added Decades on subchannel 51.3. On November 1, 2017, WNYA replaced Antenna TV with Light TV on subchannel 51.2.

WNYA shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 51, on June 12, 2009, the official date on which full power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station "flash cut" its digital signal into operation on VHF channel 13, using virtual channel 51.