History
WTEN began broadcasting on October 14, 1953, as WROW-TV on UHF channel 41.[1] It was owned by the Hudson Valley Broadcasting Company, operating alongside WROW radio (590 AM). The two stations shared space inside a former retirement home for nuns on a farm dirt road in the town of North Greenbush, near Troy. It broadcast from a temporary transmitter in Herkimer, limiting the signal to the immediate area. The station went to full power and installed a permanent tower next to the studio a few months later.[2] It was originally the Capital District's ABC affiliate.
Within their first year, the station was losing money, and on the verge of bankruptcy. By November 1954, Hudson Valley's shareholders sold controlling interest to a New York City–based syndicate group led by legendary radio broadcaster/author Lowell Thomas and his manager/business partner Frank Smith, who became president of the company upon completion of the sale.[3] After the sale, the station switched its affiliation to CBS on February 1, 1955. In the spring of 1956, the station's call letters were changed to WCDA (for "Capital District Albany")[4] and a satellite station, WCDB (channel 29) in nearby Hagaman, New York was launched to reach areas in the northern portion of the market where the main signal did not penetrate.[5] In December 1957, Hudson Valley merged with Durham Broadcasting Enterprises, the owners of WTVD in Durham, North Carolina, to form Capital Cities Television Corporation (predecessor of Capital Cities Communications) with WCDA as its flagship station.
That same year, the call letters were changed again to WTEN when the station moved to VHF channel 10. By this time, the market had expanded to cover not only east-central New York, but also large swaths of southwestern Vermont and western Massachusetts. Not only is this market one of the largest east of the Mississippi River, but much of it is very mountainous. UHF stations have never covered large areas or rugged terrain very well. When the FCC allocated two additional VHF channels to Albany, Hudson Valley sought and received permission to move to channel 10.
Upon moving to the VHF band, the station's transmitter was moved to Vail Mills, approximately 35 mi west of Albany. This was necessary to protect both WHEC-TV/WVET-TV in Rochester and WJAR-TV in Providence, Rhode Island. But the new transmitter proved inadequate for serving the Capital District proper. The FCC eventually allowed a waiver in 1963 which let WTEN move its transmitter to Voorheesville, closer to Albany.[6] The new transmitter, located on the Helderberg Escarpment, was on some of the highest ground in the region, giving WTEN a coverage area comparable to that of long-dominant WRGB (channel 6).
In 1966, WTEN and WROW moved to new facilities on Albany's northside on Northern Boulevard. Channel 10 is still based there today (the WROW radio stations moved out in 1993, ten years after they were sold by Capital Cities). In 1966, the old studio in North Greenbush was burned down by an arson fire, but the station's owner donated its old transmitter to WRPI radio.
On April 27, 1971, Capital Cities sold WTEN to Poole Broadcasting. Following its purchase of several broadcast properties from Triangle Publications, Capital Cities had to sell off two VHF stations to stay within the FCC's limit of five stations per owner at the time. In mid-1977, Poole sold WTEN and sister stations WJRT-TV in Flint, Michigan, and WPRI-TV in Providence to Knight-Ridder, with the deal finalized in 1978. Before the sale could be completed, Knight-Ridder signed an affiliation deal with ABC, which resulted in WTEN swapping affiliations with WAST (channel 13, NBC-affiliated WNYT) on October 23, 1977, thus returning ABC to its original affiliate in the Capital District (WPRI-TV had switched to ABC from CBS that June and would eventually reaffiliate with CBS in September 1995, nine years after WTEN's former owners, Capital Cities, completed its acquisition of ABC in January 1986). Upon Knight-Ridder's exit from broadcasting in 1989, WTEN and sister station WKRN-TV in Nashville were sold to Young Broadcasting. Since the Young purchases of the two stations plus WTEN satellite WCDC were made through two separate deals, they were consummated more than three months apart.
WTEN signed on its digital signal on UHF channel 26 in 2004 and began offering high definition service from the start. On October 1, 2007, Young Broadcasting launched the Retro Television Network (RTV) on a new third digital subchannel of WTEN. This was part of a test of the network with sister stations WBAY-TV in Green Bay and KRON-TV in San Francisco.
In an effort to cut costs, the company eliminated ten positions from WTEN on January 31, 2008, fueling speculation that the company might sell the station in order to pay down its financial debt. In January 2009, after failing to meet the minimum standards for listing on NASDAQ, Young Broadcasting was dropped from the exchange.[7] One month later, on February 13, they declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy.[8] The company planned to auction off its stations in a New York City bankruptcy court on July 14, 2009, but canceled the auction at the last minute.[9] After multiple issues with RTV operations and programming, Young switched their main subchannel affiliations to ABC's Live Well Network as part of a group deal with Young's other stations in 2012.[10]
On July 27, 2012, it was announced that the Capital District's Fox affiliate, WXXA-TV, owned by Newport Television, would be sold to Shield Media, LLC (owned by White Knight Broadcasting vice president Sheldon Galloway) for $19.2 million. That company then entered into a shared services agreement with Young Broadcasting resulting in WTEN operating WXXA. On October 23, the FCC granted the transaction.[11][12][13] The move was completed on March 23, 2013.[14] Soon afterward, WXXA closed its studios on Corporate Circle in Albany and moved its operations to WTEN.
On June 6, 2013, Young Broadcasting announced that it would merge with Media General.[15] The merger was approved by the FCC on November 8, after Media General shareholders approved the merger a day earlier;[16] it was completed on November 12.[17] More than two years later, on January 27, 2016, it was announced that the Nexstar Broadcasting Group would buy Media General for $4.6 billion. WTEN and the operations of WXXA became part of "Nexstar Media Group".[18] The acquisition resulted in Nexstar owning stations in every television market in Upstate New York; the sale was completed on January 17, 2017.
WCDB
In the spring of 1956, satellite station WCDB on UHF channel 29 in Hagaman was launched to reach areas in the northern portion of the market where WCDA's main signal didn't penetrate.[5] This signed off in 1957 after WCDA moved its transmitter closer to Albany, making WCDB redundant even though it did provide some primary CBS coverage to Utica. The WCDB call sign would return to the air in 1978 for the student-run radio station at University at Albany. The UHF channel 29 allocation remained in the Albany market until the DTV transition in 2009; however, no other station had used the channel number since WCDB's sign-off.[19]
WCDC-TV
WCDC began broadcasting on February 5, 1954, as WMGT ("Mount Greylock Television") on UHF channel 74, the highest channel number ever used by a full-power U.S. television station.[21] WMGT began as a separate station affiliated with the DuMont network. The tower location on Mount Greylock (part of a state reserve) helped WMGT serve first as the market's secondary affiliate of DuMont and later as a major boost to WCDA.
