WNYO-TV (channel 49) is a television station in Buffalo, New York, United States. It is programmed primarily as an independent station, but maintains a secondary affiliation with MyNetworkTV. WNYO-TV is owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group alongside Fox affiliate WUTV (channel 29) and the two stations share studios on Hertel Avenue near Military Road in Buffalo; WNYO-TV's transmitter is located on Whitehaven Road (near I-190) in Grand Island, New York.
The construction permit for channel 49 was issued in 1984 and changed hands twice before the station went on the air on September 1, 1987, as WNYB-TV. While TVX Broadcast Group handled much of the station's construction, the company made another purchase that forced it to sell the unbuilt WNYB-TV to remain under national ownership limits. Channel 49's first owner was Aud Enterprises, a division of the Buffalo Sabres hockey team; channel 49 aired Sabres road games and served as the Fox affiliate from 1989 to 1990. It also lost an average of $1 million a year. In 1990, under a deal brokered the previous year, the Sabres games, Fox programming, and syndicated shows on WNYB-TV moved to WUTV, with Tri-State Christian Television (TCT) buying channel 49 to broadcast Christian programming.
TCT sold WNYB-TV to Grant Broadcasting in 1996; the deal included TCT's acquisition of a dormant station on channel 26 in Jamestown, which became the new WNYB. In October 1996, Grant relaunched channel 49 as WNYO-TV, the Buffalo affiliate of The WB. Sinclair purchased the station in 2000, forming a duopoly with WUTV. The station produced its own local newscast from 2004 to 2006 as part of Sinclair's News Central service and then aired local news programming produced by Buffalo NBC affiliate WGRZ from 2006 to 2013. WNYO-TV is Buffalo's ATSC 3.0 (NextGen TV) station; in reciprocal arrangements, other Buffalo TV stations broadcast its subchannels on its behalf while it carries them in the new format.
History Channel 49 was added to Buffalo in lieu of channel 76 in February 1966 as part of a national overhaul of UHF channel allocations. The Beta Television Corporation obtained the construction permit that June, but despite attempts to sell the permit to Evans Broadcasting Corporation and New York City's WPIX, as well as a call sign change from WBAU-TV to WBBU-TV, the construction permit was deleted in January 1971.
Permitting In 1979, interest coalesced again around channel 49, with applicants investigating the possibility of building a station to broadcast subscription television (STV) programming to paying customers. The first formal application filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) came from Anax Corporation in June. A group of California investors doing business as the Great Erie County Telecasting Corporation made its application in October, followed by Channel 49 Buffalo Television, owned by an investor consortium from Baltimore, the minority-owned Unific Broadcasting Company, and Bison City Television 49, whose principals were primarily from St. Louis.
In 1981, the FCC designated the applications for comparative hearing; an FCC administrative law judge initially dismissed Bison City's application because of a failure to establish ownership, but the company successfully appealed. The field thinned considerably when Unific settled with Anax, Great Erie County, and Channel 49 Buffalo Television at the start of the hearing, leaving Unific and Bison City the only contenders for the permit. While Unific believed its local ownership and proposal to feature programming for the Black community in Buffalo made it a superior applicant, administrative law judge Walter C. Miller selected Bison City over Unific; the primary reason was that the latter company had asked for four amendments to its financial qualifications due to an inability to secure financing.
Bison City made some progress at building channel 49; it attempted to secure financing to go on air in 1984, and it even purchased some syndicated programs for the station to air. In 1985, the station secured a tower site in Colden over the objections of some local residents, and Bison City engaged the services of Media Central of Chattanooga, Tennessee, to build the facilities on its behalf, with the call sign WNYB-TV selected.
TVX: ownership but not operation Lacking the financial resources to build the station, Bison City sold 80 percent interest in the WNYB construction permit to TVX Broadcast Group, a chain of independent TV stations, in 1985. TVX proceeded with construction, but a change in its business plan put the station on hold. In November 1986, TVX acquired five major-market independents from Taft Broadcasting. Including the under-construction WNYB-TV but excluding WNRW-TV in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which it was selling, TVX already owned eight stations; the Taft deal put TVX one station over the 12-station limit of the time. TVX announced its intention to sell the WNYB-TV construction permit.
In May 1987, TVX reached a deal to sell WNYB-TV to a subsidiary of the First Allied Corporation, owned by Malcolm Glazer of Rochester. First Allied, in turn, announced that WNYB-TV would begin broadcasting on July 1 from the under-construction studios on Hertel Avenue. However, by late June, the sale to First Allied had fallen through, and the start of the station had been delayed until September to align with the start of the new television season as well as contracts for much of the new outlet's programming.
Sabres ownership Needing to dispose of a ready-to-operate television station, TVX reportedly approached the Buffalo Sabres, the city's National Hockey League (NHL) franchise, among other groups. By then, the Sabres were the only U.S.-based NHL team whose games still aired on a major network affiliate—NBC affiliate WGRZ (channel 2). Although WGRZ had been the television home of the Sabres for a decade, its interest in renewing the contract waned because it had to preempt NBC programming for Sabres games. The Sabres formed Aud Enterprises (named for Buffalo Memorial Auditorium, popularly known as "the Aud") as a subsidiary to buy WNYB-TV; the purchase was announced on July 20, 1987. While WGRZ nominally had the right to match channel 49's offer to air the Sabres, the franchise deliberately made it difficult for channel 2 to do so by announcing plans to increase the number of televised games from 24 to 29. This cleared the way for the Sabres to effectively take their local telecasts in-house.
Even though Citadel Communications, owner of competing independent WUTV, alleged that Robert E. Rich Jr.'s minority ownership in the Sabres and two Buffalo radio stations violated cross-ownership rules, the FCC discarded Citadel's complaint and approved the transfer to Aud Enterprises on September 1, 1987. This cleared the way for WNYB-TV to sign on for the first time that evening. The deal formally closed in early November. The $4.63 million purchase price represented the value of the property, as construction permits could not be sold at a profit under FCC regulation. In addition to syndicated reruns and movies, as well as the Sabres, WNYB-TV aired broadcasts of Buffalo Bisons minor-league baseball games.
Fox and WUTV had a falling out in 1989 over the network's alleged underperformance in Buffalo compared to other markets. Another concern was that CHCH-TV in Hamilton, Ontario, aired Fox programming as well. Channel 29 believed this caused unnecessary duplication because of the proximity of Hamilton to Buffalo and CHCH's presence on Buffalo-area cable systems. Additionally, CHCH was able to invoke simultaneous substitution of WUTV during Fox programs it carried, cutting into channel 29's ability to sell advertising to its large Canadian audience. Fox moved its programming to WNYB-TV effective September 1, 1989; it did not have the Canadian cable carriage of WUTV and did not depend financially on advertising revenue from Canada. This also left it far less financially lucrative; in two years of operation, WNYB-TV lost an average of $1 million a year, and from launch to April 1990, the team had lost $6 million on the station.
Consolidation with WUTV; sale to TCT In August 1989, Norman Lear's Act III Broadcasting moved to purchase WUTV from Citadel. However, it soon put the purchase on hold temporarily to negotiate a second acquisition: that of WNYB-TV's programming and facilities from the Sabres. Act III had pulled off a similar station consolidation the year before in Richmond, Virginia, when it bought WRLH-TV as well as the programming inventory of competitor WVRN-TV, which then shut down.
On August 29, 1989, Act III announced that it would buy WUTV along with WNYB-TV's programming and Fox affiliation, which would move to channel 29. Simultaneously, the Sabres announced that channel 49's transmitting facility would be sold to Tri-State Christian Television (TCT) of Marion, Illinois. In exchange, Sabres owners Seymour Knox and Robert Swados received equity in WUTV and would move their road games from channel 49 to channel 29, where they would have the exposure on Canadian cable systems that WNYB-TV had lacked since launching. The pair of deals would together reimburse the Sabres for their losses in running WNYB-TV. Approval of this set of transactions was not certain since Act III already owned WUHF in Rochester. Both stations' signals overlapped in Orleans and Genesee counties, and the overlap was large enough that Act III could not buy WNYB-TV without an FCC waiver. In a letter seeking such a waiver, Act III billed the deal as a "consolidation" of WUTV and WNYB-TV. Act III argued that the Buffalo market could not support what were essentially two independent stations due to its "fiercely competitive nature" and the difficulties of UHF broadcasting. It also faced objections from commercial stations WIVB-TV in Buffalo and WROC-TV in Rochester, as well as Stevens Media Services of Buffalo, which decried the monopolizing of the UHF television market and took issue with the overlap between the stations.
In June 1990, the FCC approved the WUTV sale to Act III, granting a one-year waiver to Act III to allow it to sell off WUHF; it had already granted the WNYB-TV sale to TCT in November 1989. WNYB-TV's programming, including Fox shows, was immediately merged onto WUTV's schedule, and TCT took over channel 49 on June 28, 1990, airing Christian ministry programming.
Grant ownership The structure of the purchase of WNYB-TV by TCT incentivized Tri-State Christian Television to continue the station as a non-profit for five years by including a series of sliding scale payments to the Sabres that increased if the station began accepting commercial advertising or was sold to a commercial broadcaster. With the five years up, in December 1995, TCT made a deal with Grant Broadcasting. The deal would see Grant buy channel 49 from TCT, which would receive $12 million and the construction permit for WTJA (channel 26) in Jamestown, which had last broadcast in 1991.