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WGBY-TV (channel 57) is a
PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcasting, public broadcaster and Non-commercial activity, non-commercial, Terrestrial television, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virginia. PBS is a publicly fu ...
member
television station A television station is a set of equipment managed by a business, organisation or other entity, such as an amateur television (ATV) operator, that transmits video content and audio content via radio waves directly from a transmitter on the earth ...
in
Springfield, Massachusetts Springfield is a city in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, United States, and the seat of Hampden County. Springfield sits on the eastern bank of the Connecticut River near its confluence with three rivers: the western Westfield River, the ...
, United States. Owned by the
Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
-based
WGBH Educational Foundation The WGBH Educational Foundation (also known as GBH since August 2020) is an American public broadcasting group based in Boston, Massachusetts. Established in 1951, it holds the licenses to all of the PBS member stations in Massachusetts, and op ...
, it is a
sister station In broadcasting, sister stations or sister channels are radio or television stations operated by the same company, either by direct ownership or through a management agreement. Radio sister stations will often have different formats, and somet ...
to that organization's
flagship A flagship is a vessel used by the commanding officer of a group of naval ships, characteristically a flag officer entitled by custom to fly a distinguishing flag. Used more loosely, it is the lead ship in a fleet of vessels, typically the fi ...
and namesake,
WGBH-TV WGBH-TV (channel 2), branded on-air as GBH or GBH 2 since 2020, is the primary PBS member television station in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is the flagship property of the WGBH Educational Foundation, which also owns Boston's sec ...
(channel 2) (however, it brands as a separate, locally focused PBS outlet);
New England Public Media New England Public Media is a non-profit organization that operates the public broadcasting outlets in Western Massachusetts, including the Springfield area. It operates the region's NPR member, Amherst-licensed WFCR (New England Public Radio) a ...
, which also controls
Amherst Amherst may refer to: People * Amherst (surname), including a list of people with the name * Earl Amherst of Arracan in the East Indies, a title in the British Peerage; formerly ''Baron Amherst'' * Baron Amherst of Hackney of the City of London, ...
-licensed
NPR National Public Radio (NPR, stylized in all lowercase) is an American privately and state funded nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It differs from other ...
member
WFCR WFCR (88.5 MHz) is a non-commercial FM radio station licensed to Amherst, Massachusetts. It serves as the National Public Radio (NPR) member station for Western Massachusetts, including Springfield. The station operates at 13,000 watts ERP f ...
(88.5 FM), operates WGBY-TV under a program service agreement. WGBY-TV provides programming to much of western Massachusetts and northern
Connecticut Connecticut () is the southernmost state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, New York to the west, and Long Island Sound to the south. Its cap ...
, with studios based in the Irene Mennen Hunter Public Media Center on Hampden Street alongside
I-91 Interstate 91 (I-91) is an Interstate Highway in the New England region of the United States. It provides the primary north–south thoroughfare in the western part of the region. The Interstate generally follows the course of the Connecti ...
in downtown Springfield (named for the heiress to the
Mennen Mennen is a brand owned in most parts of the world by the Colgate-Palmolive Company. Its most notable product, Mennen Speed Stick, with its fougère perfume and green wide stick, was the US market leader among deodorants and antiperspirants for ...
personal care fortune and former WGBY-TV board member). Its transmitter is located on the peak of Mount Tom in
Holyoke Holyoke is a city in Hampden County, Massachusetts, United States, that lies between the western bank of the Connecticut River and the Mount Tom Range. As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 38,238. Located north of Springfield ...
with the area's
commercial Commercial may refer to: * a dose of advertising conveyed through media (such as - for example - radio or television) ** Radio advertisement ** Television advertisement * (adjective for:) commerce, a system of voluntary exchange of products and s ...
television stations. WGBY-TV is also available on
Comcast Xfinity Comcast Cable Communications, LLC, doing business as Xfinity, is an American telecommunications company and division of Comcast Corporation used to market consumer cable television, internet, telephone, and wireless services provided by the com ...
channel 2 in
Windham County, Vermont Windham County is a county located in the U.S. state of Vermont. As of the 2020 census, the population was 45,905. The shire town (county seat) is Newfane, and the largest municipality is the town of Brattleboro. History Fort Bridgman, Vernon ...
(alongside
Vermont PBS Vermont Public Co. is the public broadcaster serving the U.S. state of Vermont. Its headquarters, newsroom, and radio studios are located in Colchester, with television studios in Winooski. It operates two statewide radio services aligned with ...
).


History

WGBY logo used from 2010 to 2020 The station first signed on the air on September 26, 1971, as a PBS member station. Prior to the station's sign-on (and for the network's first year of existence), viewers in Western Massachusetts could watch PBS programming over the air on outskirt public television stations, including WGBH-TV to the east,
WMHT WMHT can refer to the following broadcasting stations in the Albany, New York area: *WMHT (TV), UHF channel 17 *WMHT-FM WMHT-FM (89.1 MHz) is a listener-supported, non-commercial radio station licensed to Schenectady, and serving the Capital D ...
from Albany from the west, or
WEDH Connecticut Public Television (CPTV) is the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) network affiliate#Member stations, member network for the U.S. state of Connecticut. It is owned by Connecticut Public Broadcasting, a community-based non-profit orga ...
from
Hartford Hartford is the capital city of the U.S. state of Connecticut. It was the seat of Hartford County until Connecticut disbanded county government in 1960. It is the core city in the Greater Hartford metropolitan area. Census estimates since the ...
(the latter remains available on most cable providers in the Springfield market). In October 2006, WGBY became the first television station in New England to produce all of its local programming content in high definition. Some
Spanish-language Spanish ( or , Castilian) is a Romance languages, Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from colloquial Latin spoken on the Iberian peninsula. Today, it is a world language, global language with more than 500 millio ...
programming is also broadcast for Springfield's
Hispanic and Latino Hispanic and Latino Americans ( es, Estadounidenses hispanos y latinos; pt, Estadunidenses hispânicos e latinos) are Americans of Spaniards, Spanish and/or Latin Americans, Latin American ancestry. More broadly, these demographics include a ...
community. Unlike its Boston counterpart, WGBY had no affiliation with an NPR member station in the area previously; the area has been served by the
Five College Consortium The Five College Consortium (often referred to as simply the Five Colleges) comprises four liberal arts colleges and one university in the Connecticut River Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts: Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holy ...
's WFCR and WNNZ/
WAIC WAIC (91.9 FM) is the college radio station of American International College in Springfield, Massachusetts. It is operated by the Five College Consortium's National Public Radio member station, WFCR, and serves as a relay of the all-news form ...
, collectively known as New England Public Radio. The WGBH Educational Foundation held the license of WFCR from 1961 until its transfer to the
University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, it ...
in 1967, four years before WGBY-TV began operations. On April 11, 2019, WGBY and WFCR announced that they would consolidate operations under the
New England Public Media New England Public Media is a non-profit organization that operates the public broadcasting outlets in Western Massachusetts, including the Springfield area. It operates the region's NPR member, Amherst-licensed WFCR (New England Public Radio) a ...
banner, effective in July; the WGBH Educational Foundation will retain the WGBY-TV license, with NEPM operating the station under a program service operating agreement. All of the various NEPR stations and WGBY will continue to have their licenses and facilities owned by their individual organizations and schools. In July 2020, WGBY officially rebranded as a part of New England Public Media, rather than being a part of WGBH's overall September 1, 2020, rebranding of their Boston operations to remove the "W" as branding for their radio and television stations.


Programming

WGBY WGBY-TV (channel 57) is a PBS member television station in Springfield, Massachusetts, United States. Owned by the Boston-based WGBH Educational Foundation, it is a sister station to that organization's flagship and namesake, WGBH-TV (channe ...
features several locally produced programs, including the daily program ''Connecting Point'', which has local features and roundtables involving aspects of Pioneer Valley arts, issues, economic, criminal, and educational issues. The Friday edition of the series is entitled ''The State We're In'' and deals with local and Commonwealth political issues, along with debate programming in election years. ''
As Schools Match Wits ''As Schools Match Wits'' is a high school quiz show, hosted by Beth Ward, that airs on PBS member station WGBY in Springfield, Massachusetts, and which is produced in association with Westfield State University. ''As Schools Match Wits'' is well k ...
'' is a long-running local quiz bowl program which originated on
WWLP WWLP (channel 22) is a television station in Springfield, Massachusetts, United States, affiliated with NBC and The CW Plus. Owned by Nexstar Media Group, the station has studios at Broadcast Center in the Sandy Hill section of Chicopee at the ...
in 1961, and moved to WGBY in 2007 under license from WWLP due to costs associated with newly enacted FCC regulations involving closed captioning. The program is co-produced with
Westfield State University Westfield State University (Westfield State) is a public university in Westfield, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1839 by Horace Mann as the first public co-educational college in America without barrier to race, gender, or economic class. Ran ...
. Finally, ''Presencia'' is a weekly
bilingual Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all E ...
program which spotlights the region's
Hispanic-American Hispanic and Latino Americans ( es, Estadounidenses hispanos y latinos; pt, Estadunidenses hispânicos e latinos) are Americans of Spanish and/or Latin American ancestry. More broadly, these demographics include all Americans who identify as ...
community, and uses captioning, dubbing, and subtitling to allow both Spanish and English-speaking viewers to equally watch the program.


Technical information


Subchannels

The station's digital signal is
multiplexed In telecommunications and computer networking, multiplexing (sometimes contracted to muxing) is a method by which multiple analog or digital signals are combined into one signal over a shared medium. The aim is to share a scarce resource - a ...
:


Analog-to-digital conversion

On August 4, 2008, WGBY filed a request with the
Federal Communications Commission The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisdiction ...
(FCC) to discontinue regular programming on its analog signal, over
UHF Ultra high frequency (UHF) is the ITU designation for radio frequencies in the range between 300 megahertz (MHz) and 3 gigahertz (GHz), also known as the decimetre band as the wavelengths range from one meter to one tenth of a meter (on ...
channel 57, on November 5, 2008—some three months prior to the original mandated analog shut-off date. The petition cited the need to replace the current analog antenna with the post transition digital 22 antenna. WGBY also filed for an STA to operate at 50% analog power prior to the early shut down date due to equipment failure Although it had an assigned digital channel that it would move to post-transition that differed from its original digital channel, WGBY continued to broadcast its digital signal on its pre-transition allocation (UHF channel 58). On April 27, 2009, the station's digital signal later moved to UHF channel 22, using
PSIP The Program and System Information Protocol (PSIP) is the MPEG (a video and audio industry group) and privately defined program-specific information originally defined by General Instrument for the DigiCipher 2 system and later extended for the A ...
to display the station's
virtual channel In most telecommunications organizations, a virtual channel is a method of remapping the ''program number'' as used in H.222 Program Association Tables and Program Mapping Tables to a channel number that can be entered via digits on a receiver's ...
as its former UHF analog channel 57, which was among the high band UHF channels (52–69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition. As a result of the FCC's 2016
spectrum auction A spectrum auction is a process whereby a government uses an auction system to sell the rights to transmit signals over specific bands of the electromagnetic spectrum and to assign scarce spectrum resources. Depending on the specific auction form ...
, the WGBH Educational Foundation accepted a $57 million offer to moved WGBY-TV to the VHF spectrum on July 22, 2019, on channel 13, along with WGBH-TV for $161.7 million. On January 16, 2017, the station launched the newest iteration of the
PBS Kids PBS Kids is the brand for most of the children's programming aired by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the United States. Some public television children's programs are not produced by PBS member stations or transmitted by PBS. Instead, ...
Channel on their third subchannel.


References


External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Wgby-Tv PBS member stations GBY-TV WGBH Educational Foundation Television channels and stations established in 1971 1971 establishments in Massachusetts