WNYI (channel 52) is a
religious
Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatur ...
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 eart ...
licensed to
Ithaca, New York
Ithaca is a city in the Finger Lakes region of New York, United States. Situated on the southern shore of Cayuga Lake, Ithaca is the seat of Tompkins County and the largest community in the Ithaca metropolitan statistical area. It is named ...
, United States, serving the
Elmira,
Binghamton
Binghamton () is a city in the U.S. state of New York, and serves as the county seat of Broome County. Surrounded by rolling hills, it lies in the state's Southern Tier region near the Pennsylvania border, in a bowl-shaped valley at the conflue ...
and
Syracuse television markets as an
owned-and-operated station of the
Daystar Television Network
The Daystar Television Network (commonly referred to as Daystar Television, often shortened to Daystar) is an American evangelical Christian-based religious television network owned by the Word of God Fellowship, founded by Marcus Lamb in 1993. ...
. The station's transmitter is located on Quarry Road in
Moravia, New York
Moravia is a town in Cayuga County, New York, United States. The population was 3,626 at the 2010 census.
The town of Moravia contains a village also called Moravia. The town is in the Finger Lakes region, south of Auburn.
History
Moravia wa ...
. It shares its channel and tower with co-owned WDSS-LD, a
low-power translator station
A broadcast relay station, also known as a satellite station, relay transmitter, broadcast translator (U.S.), re-broadcaster (Canada), repeater (two-way radio) or complementary station (Mexico), is a broadcast transmitter which repeats (or tran ...
that previously broadcast on
UHF channel 38 from a transmitter in
Onondaga.
History
The original
construction permit was issued to "Ithaca 52 Inc." in December 1999, valid for three years, with the first program tests run in late 2002 to meet a
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 jurisdicti ...
(FCC) deadline. The initial broadcast consisted of 26
kW of
color bars
SMPTE color bars are a television test pattern used where the NTSC video standard is utilized, including countries in North America. The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) refers to the pattern as Engineering Guideline ...
from a tower location near
Ithaca College
Ithaca College is a private college in Ithaca, New York. It was founded by William Egbert in 1892 as a conservatory of music and is set against the backdrop of the city of Ithaca (which is separate from the town), Cayuga Lake, waterfalls, and go ...
.
The station was sold to Caroline Pawley in June 2003 and to
Equity Broadcasting in 2004; as a
Univision
Univision () is an American Spanish-language free-to-air television network owned by TelevisaUnivision. It is the United States' largest provider of Spanish-language content. The network's programming is aimed at the Latino public and includes ...
affiliate it had been fed remotely via satellite from Equity's
central automated satellite hub in
Little Rock, Arkansas
( The "Little Rock")
, government_type = Council-manager
, leader_title = Mayor
, leader_name = Frank Scott Jr.
, leader_party = D
, leader_title2 = Council
, leader_name2 ...
since 2004. WNYI, licensed as a
full service station despite its low signal power terrestrially, had applied for
must-carry
In cable television, governments apply a must-carry regulation stating that locally licensed television stations must be carried on a cable provider's system.
North America Canada
Under current CRTC regulations, the lowest tier of service on ...
access to
Time Warner Cable
Time Warner Cable, Inc. (TWC) was an American cable television company. Before it was acquired by Charter Communications on May 18, 2016, it was ranked the second largest cable company in the United States by revenue behind only Comcast, operat ...
in Syracuse in May 2005. While Ithaca is nominally in the Syracuse market area, the terrestrial WNYI signal had always been inadequate to reach Syracuse or other communities outside of Ithaca itself. The station had made various applications for an increase in licensed power but no decisions had been made by the FCC on these requests.
WNYI was the only full-service television station in upstate New York to provide
Spanish language
Spanish ( or , Castilian) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from colloquial Latin spoken on the Iberian peninsula. Today, it is a global language with more than 500 million native speakers, mainly in th ...
programming.
At auction on April 16, 2009, Daystar bought WNYI, pending approval by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court. Daystar changed programming to its namesake network. Univision's national feed was quickly returned to Time Warner Cable (now
Spectrum
A spectrum (plural ''spectra'' or ''spectrums'') is a condition that is not limited to a specific set of values but can vary, without gaps, across a continuum. The word was first used scientifically in optics to describe the rainbow of colors ...
), causing little to no impact for viewers, and due to various technical issues which often plagued Equity's stations, steadied the area's access to the network.
Technical information
Subchannels
Analog-to-digital conversion
WNYI shut down its analog signal, over
UHF channel 52, and "
flash-cut" its digital signal into operation to UHF channel 20. Because it was granted an original
construction permit after the FCC finalized the DTV allotment plan on April 21, 1997, the station did not receive a companion channel for a digital television station. Through the use of
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 AT ...
, digital television receivers 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 52, which was among the high band UHF channels (52-69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition.
Both the ability of WNYI to transition to digital and its ability to continue broadcasting were directly jeopardized as on December 8, 2008, the
licensee's parent corporation filed a petition for
bankruptcy relief under
Chapter 11
Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code (Title 11 of the United States Code) permits reorganization under the bankruptcy laws of the United States. Such reorganization, known as Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is available to every business, wheth ...
of the
federal bankruptcy code, case #4:08-BK-17646-M,
U.S. district court for the district of Arkansas, notifying the FCC that "This station must obtain post-petition financing and court approval before
digital facilities may be constructed. The station must cease
analog broadcasting on (the end of DTV transition in)
2009, regardless of whether digital facilities are operational by that date. The station will file authority to remain
silent if so required by the FCC."
While the
DTV Delay Act
The digital transition in the United States was the switchover from analog to exclusively digital broadcasting of terrestrial television programming. According to David Rehr, then president and CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters, th ...
extended this deadline to June 12, 2009, Equity had applied for an extension of the digital construction permit in order to retain the
broadcast license
A broadcast license is a type of spectrum license granting the licensee permission to use a portion of the radio frequency spectrum in a given geographical area for broadcasting purposes. The licenses generally include restrictions, which vary f ...
after the station went dark. WNYI could not continue analogue operations as it was a
full service station on a frequency which is to be reallocated for non-broadcast use at the end of the digital television transition.
On June 12, 2009 a license to cover was granted to Word of God Fellowship for WNYI by the FCC.
That firm was required to construct digital television facilities on an in-core frequency before WNYI could be returned to the air, which needed to occur before June 12, 2010, lest the license be automatically forfeited to the FCC. On the weekend of May 22–23, WNYI commenced digital broadcasts on channel 20, within weeks of its license deadline.
[Fybush, Scott (2010-05-24)]
Two Station Sales in New York
''NorthEast Radio Watch''. Retrieved 2010-05-24.
References
External links
{{Daystar stations
Daystar (TV network) affiliates
Equity Media Holdings
Television channels and stations established in 2002
NYI
2002 establishments in New York (state)