WFUT-DT
WFUT-DT is a television station licensed to Newark, New Jersey, United States, serving as the UniMás outlet for the New York City area. It is owned and operated by TelevisaUnivision. Under common ownership with Paterson, New Jersey–licensed Univision station WXTV-DT, both stations share studio facilities on Frank W. Burr Boulevard in Teaneck, New Jersey, and transmitter facilities at the Empire State Building in Midtown Manhattan. The programming of both stations and True Crime Network is simulcast to Long Island and southern Connecticut from WFTY-DT, broadcasting from Middle Island, New York.
Channel 68 was originally awarded to Walter Reade in 1970 as part of what had initially been an attempt to revive WRTV, a dead UHF station of the mid-1950s broadcasting from Asbury Park. The station was sold to Blonder-Tongue Laboratories and began broadcasting as WBTB-TV on September 29, 1974. It offered a limited amount of New Jersey–specific programming but ran out of money after 90 days. The station returned on September 28, 1975, this time as a specialist outlet offering financial, foreign-language, and children's programs. The station was the first broadcast outlet for The Uncle Floyd Show, a local children's program that gained a cult following in the New York metropolitan area.
After conglomerate Wometco Enterprises reached a deal to become channel 68's majority owner, on March 1, 1977, WBTB-TV became the first station in the U.S. at that time to broadcast subscription television programming to paying users. When Wometco closed on the transaction, the station changed its call sign to WTVG and then WWHT, and the subscription service took the name Wometco Home Theater. WHT provided first-run movies and New York sports programming to households in areas unserved by cable. Its reach was expanded in 1980 when WHT began appearing on channel 67, then WSNL-TV; Wometco acquired that station outright in 1981. At its peak, WHT served more than 111,000 subscribers and was the fourth-largest STV system in the nation.
The death of Wometco majority owner Mitchell Wolfson in 1983 triggered a leveraged buyout by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. As subscriptions declined due to rising cable penetration, Wometco sold off the WHT business but kept channels 68 and 67, which began broadcasting a music video service known as U68 on June 1, 1985. U68 was a locally programmed competitor to MTV with a more eclectic mix of music. The stations were put on the market in December 1985 because KKR executed a second leveraged buyout, this time of Storer Communications, and chose to retain Storer's cable systems in northern New Jersey and Connecticut over WWHT and WSNL-TV. The two stations were sold to the Home Shopping Network as part of its foray into broadcasting; renamed WHSE and WHSI, they broadcast home shopping programming for the next 15 years. While an attempt by company owner Barry Diller to convert the stations to general-entertainment independents was slated as late as 2000, Diller ultimately sold WHSE and WHSI and other USA Broadcasting stations to Univision in 2001. Many of these stations formed the backbone of Telefutura, which launched in January 2002, at which time WHSE and WHSI became WFUT and WFTY.
Early years
Prehistory
In August 1966, two groups applied for channel 68 in Newark, New Jersey, which they hoped to telecast from the Empire State Building in New York City. One application came from Clifton S. Green, a businessman from Brooklyn, while the other came from Atlantic Video Corporation, owned by the Walter Reade Sterling chain of movie theaters. Their proposals to use the Empire State Building were contested by WPIX and the Association of Maximum Service Telecasters as being too close to the allotment of channel 67 to Patchogue, New York, and circumventing the need to serve Newark, not New York. The Reade application was unique in that it was initially filed as the modification of a construction permit for Reade's long-dead WRTV in Asbury Park; WPIX also contended that the relocated channel 68 facility would not serve Monmouth or Ocean counties in New Jersey. The next year, Walter Reade amended its application to specify a tower in West Orange, New Jersey, instead of the Empire State Building. In 1969, the commission deleted WRTV and its call letters, proceeding to consider the Newark modification as a request for a construction permit.Reade was awarded the channel 68 construction permit in March 1970. The Reade organization promised that the new station, which it intended to retake the WRTV call sign, would be a commercial, general-market UHF station, the first such station not to primarily program for ethnic communities in the New York metropolitan area. The WRTV call letters never made it to Newark. McGraw-Hill applied for them to be used to rename WFBM-TV in Indianapolis, which it was acquiring from Time-Life, in 1971; the new designation began use in Indianapolis on June 2, 1972.
WBTB-TV: Blonder-Tongue ownership
In 1972, Atlantic Video agreed to sell the channel 68 construction permit, designated WWRO, to the Blonder-Tongue Broadcasting Corporation, a division of Old Bridge Township, New Jersey–based Blonder-Tongue Laboratories. Blonder-Tongue's ambition for channel 68 was to use it as the first station to test its recently approved BTVision subscription television technology, which would beam otherwise scrambled pictures into the homes of paying subscribers with decoders. Isaac Blonder, a Blonder-Tongue executive, cited the potential for STV to acquire the rights to first-run movies and entertainment programs previously unavailable over conventional, ad-supported television, and he believed his service would eventually have more than 500,000 subscribers in the New York metropolitan area. Blonder-Tongue obtained FCC approval to acquire channel 68 in August, leaving it the task to build the station, which was given a new call sign of WBTB-TV. Immediate development of the station was halted because of a faltering stock market.Blonder-Tongue applied in 1973 for approval to build a tower for the station in the Eagle Rock Reservation in West Orange. The station struggled to convince Essex County officials, who had previously advocated against the use of park land for towers; West Orange officials, who had recently passed more stringent ordinances; and the public. This greatly frustrated Blonder, who told The Home News, "Down with environmentalists!... All they know is the unintelligent use of nature. Ban anything new, that's all they care about." The tower was constructed, but the West Orange Town Council sued its owner for creating "visual pollution", a case soon settled.
WBTB-TV began broadcasting on September 29, 1974. The station would initially operate in evening hours with free, ad-supported programming and initiate subscription service at a later date, though it would also test the BTVision system outside of regular programming. The first studios were a converted two-story house in West Orange; the living room became a studio, the control room occupied the former kitchen, and upstairs bedrooms were turned into offices. The initial lineup included children's programming, a half-hour New Jersey newscast and nightly public affairs program, and old Hopalong Cassidy films and other classic shows. The station had a local children's show, The Uncle Floyd Show, on Saturdays; this weekly, live program grew out of a public-access cable series in Pompton Lakes. The station left the air on December 27, telling the FCC that it needed to resolve technical and financial difficulties before returning to the air. In March 1975, Blonder testified at a New Jersey State Senate committee hearing about the state's lack of TV news coverage that channel 68 ceased broadcasting because it lacked advertisers and because local businesses were actively against supporting the new television station.
Nine months after leaving the air, WBTB-TV returned on September 28, 1975. This time, it adopted a format dominated by specialty programs. During the day, the station offered daytime financial news coverage, which was produced by Eugene Inger. Inger provided financial support in exchange for shares in Blonder-Tongue Broadcasting and hosted the financial report. At night, it offered shows in a variety of foreign languages, the Christian show The PTL Club, and shows on New York entertainment and the Grand Ole Opry. The Uncle Floyd Show returned to WBTB-TV, this time as a live half-hour aired twice a week.
Wometco ownership
Launch of Wometco Home Theater
In April 1976, Wometco Enterprises, a Florida-based media conglomerate that owned television stations in Florida, North Carolina, and Washington state, as well as movie theaters and cable systems in New Jersey and elsewhere, agreed to buy 80 percent of WBTB in exchange for paying $1.5 million of its debts. Wometco would proceed with the development of subscription television on channel 68 using Blonder-Tongue equipment. Wometco planned to program the station's ad-supported broadcast day with shows for children. With Wometco's backing, WBTB-TV sent out its first subscription television programs using the BTVision system on March 1, 1977. Some 200 families in South Orange served as the pilot market for the subscription service, which initially broadcast two movies a night for $12.95 a month. The films had ceased running in theaters but had yet to premiere on network television.The FCC granted Wometco approval to acquire the majority stake in July 1977; however, it gave the company two years to sell off the New Jersey cable systems, as at the time cross-ownership of broadcast stations and cable systems in the same areas was not permitted. At the time Wometco took over operations of WBTB and the BTVision service, technical issues at channel 68 had kept the service from expanding beyond South Orange; it only had 500 subscribers. The new owners appointed the assistant general manager of WTVJ, Wometco's television station in Miami, to run the operation. The station changed its call sign to WTVG on July 29, 1977. BTVision then changed its name to Wometco Home Theater.
Over the next several years, Wometco expanded the availability of WHT, community by community, focusing on areas not already served by cable systems. Wometco launched a promotional push for its service in 1978. That year, the station built a translator on channel 60 atop the World Trade Center, rebroadcasting its signal in New York City, and it added 800 subscribers a week. By March 1979, it had nearly 40,000 subscribers, primarily in parts of New Jersey and the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. In addition to adding a matinee movie, it bolstered the programming offering in 1979 by adding sports broadcasts from SportsChannel New York, a regional cable service: this brought the New York Mets, New York Yankees, New York Islanders, and New Jersey Nets to WHT. By this time, the monthly service charge had increased to $17. WHT's subscriber base had grown to 72,000 by year's end.
Beyond WHT, Channel 68 continued its ad-supported broadcasting. The station produced regular programs on senior citizens and the Black community, as well as a 15-minute New Jersey news roundup; it tried its hand at all-night programming after WHT concluded with the short-lived The All-Night Show. The largest attraction continued to be children's shows. Ken Taishoff, who took over as general manager in 1979, claimed that children were more likely to watch a UHF station than their parents were. In an early 1979 survey by Arbitron, WTVG garnered its first rating point in the late afternoons when it aired the shows. The Uncle Floyd Show began to attract a cult following. The station had grown enough to merit the addition of a trailer next to the studio house to accommodate more offices.
To identify itself with the WHT service, WTVG changed its call sign to WWHT on July 16, 1979.