WPTZ
WPTZ is a television station licensed to Plattsburgh, New York, United States, serving as the NBC affiliate for the Burlington, Vermont–Plattsburgh, New York market. It is owned by Hearst Television alongside Montpelier, Vermont–licensed CW+ affiliate WNNE. WPTZ and WNNE share studios on Community Drive in South Burlington, Vermont, with a secondary studio and news bureau on Cornelia Street in Plattsburgh. Through a channel sharing agreement, the two stations transmit using WPTZ's spectrum from an antenna on Vermont's highest peak, Mount Mansfield.
History
Early years
The station signed on the air on December 8, 1954, as WIRI, originally licensed to the hamlet of North Pole, New York. It was owned by the Great Northern Broadcasting Company along with Plattsburgh's WIRY radio. The station's first studio facilities were located on Cornelia Street in Plattsburgh; the transmitter was located on Terry Mountain in Peru, New York. The station would have had the call letters WIRY-TV to match its radio sister, but at the time Federal Communications Commission regulations did not allow two stations to share the same base call letters if they were licensed to different cities.The station has been a primary NBC affiliate since its inception; it carried secondary affiliations with ABC until 1968 when WVNY signed on, and with DuMont until that network ceased operations in 1956.
Becoming WPTZ
Rollins Telecasting purchased channel 5 in 1956. The new owners changed the station's call letters to the present WPTZ ; the WPTZ call had recently been dropped by the channel 3 facility in Philadelphia following its controversial trade by Westinghouse Broadcasting to NBC earlier in that year. Until September 1965, WPTZ was the only station in its market to broadcast network color programs. WPTZ's first studio color cameras were acquired in 1971. The station was granted authority to identify as "Plattsburgh–North Pole–Burlington" in 1968. In 1979, WPTZ relocated its studios to a new building located on Old Moffitt Road in Plattsburgh.Rollins merged with Heritage Broadcasting in 1987 to form Heritage Media. In 1990, Heritage Media purchased Hartford, Vermont–based WNNE, which had been a separate station with its own news department. With Heritage's purchase, WNNE was made into a semi-satellite of WPTZ, significantly improving WPTZ's coverage in the southeastern part of the market. During the analog era, WPTZ was the only station in the market that did not operate any translators. WNNE's master control was transferred to WPTZ in 2000.
Ownership changes
Heritage sold all of its broadcasting properties to the Sinclair Broadcast Group in 1997 prior to its merger with News Corporation. The sale protected new Fox affiliate WFFF-TV, which was initially operated by WPTZ under a local marketing agreement and shared the analog transmitter on Terry Mountain. Otherwise WPTZ/WNNE, along with then-sister stations in Pensacola, Florida, and Charleston, West Virginia, would have been forced to switch to Fox. Sinclair, in turn, sold WPTZ/WNNE along with the WFFF LMA to Sunrise Television in 1998. Sunrise then decided to swap WPTZ/WNNE, along with Smith Broadcasting-owned KSBW in Salinas, California, to what was then known as Hearst-Argyle Television in return for WNAC-TV in Providence, Rhode Island, and WDTN in Dayton, Ohio; both of those stations were forced to be divested by Hearst-Argyle due to significant signal overlap with WCVB-TV in Boston and WLWT in Cincinnati. The swap became official on July 2, 1998. WFFF began operating as an independently owned and controlled station around the same time Hearst took over WPTZ/WNNE when the LMA with WPTZ was terminated.Relocating to Plattsburgh
On June 23, 1999, WPTZ petitioned the FCC to change its community of license from North Pole to Plattsburgh. The station cited the area's declining population as the reason for the change. The 2000 United States census did not even count North Pole as a separate community, instead folding it into Lake Placid. The community-of-license change was approved by the FCC on January 5, 2011. For some time before then, the station had dropped North Pole from its legal station identifications.On July 9, 2012, WPTZ's parent company Hearst Television was involved in a dispute with Time Warner Cable, leading to WPTZ being pulled from Time Warner Cable and temporarily replaced with Nexstar Broadcasting Group station WBRE-TV of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; Time Warner opted for such a distant signal like WBRE, as they do not have the rights to carry any NBC affiliate closest to them. The substitution of WBRE in place of WPTZ lasted until July 19, 2012, when the deal was reached between Hearst and Time Warner.
On August 2, 2016, just before the Summer Olympics in Rio, WPTZ changed its logo and on-air branding from "NewsChannel 5" to "NBC 5", a rarity for Hearst, which prefers to brand their stations by call letters and channel numbers rather than their network affiliation.
Move to Vermont
On June 12, 2018, WPTZ announced it was moving to a brand new broadcast facility in South Burlington, Vermont, in a building that contains both a data center for Keurig Green Mountain and the main offices of Ben & Jerry's. The move took place in July 2019, when WPTZ began broadcasting newscasts in high definition. WPTZ continued to maintain the Television Drive facility for several months in Plattsburgh as a secondary studio, while closing a now-duplicative and smaller bureau in Colchester, Vermont. WPTZ later relocated the bureau to a new location at 308 Cornelia Street in Plattsburgh, taking over the former Glens Falls National Bank branch and renovating the building to become its new secondary studio in the summer of 2020.2019 antenna fire
On November 19, 2019, WPTZ, WNNE and CBS affiliate WCAX-TV were knocked off the air by a fire at their combined antenna at the transmitter facility. The cause of the fire was unknown. The outage affected over-the-air and satellite viewers; cable subscribers continued to receive the three stations via direct fiber feeds, while Vidéotron in Quebec temporarily replaced WPTZ with Detroit NBC affiliate WDIV-TV.WPTZ-DT2
In September 2006, WPTZ established a daily web video forecast as part of a major revamping of its website. The feature, called "Weather Plus Update", introduced a logo showing WPTZ/WNNE offering NBC Weather Plus together as "5&31 Weather Plus". Starting in October, its studios in Plattsburgh underwent extensive renovations. During that time, its broadcasts were from a temporary set while the construction took place. While the studios as a whole were being upgraded, the weather department underwent the most change. In advance of the launch of NBC Weather Plus, the weather center was expanded to make room for new combined WPTZ/WNNE weather graphics and logos. The remodeling was completed by late-November.WPTZ launched Weather Plus on a new second digital subchannel on November 15 after debuting a new digital signal from Mount Mansfield a day earlier. The service was never offered on WNNE's digital signal even though this had been airing since July 20, 2005. On digital cable, WPTZ-DT2 was carried on Comcast digital channel 169, Telecom digital channel 305, and Time Warner Cable digital channel 854. It was never offered on legacy Charter systems in New York State.
In December 2008, NBC shut down the national Weather Plus service after its parent company, NBCUniversal, purchased The Weather Channel. WPTZ continued to air a locally derived version of Weather Plus until August 31, 2009, when it was replaced with This TV. This marked the network's first foray into the Plattsburgh and Burlington area along with St. Lawrence County in New York and eastern portions of the adjacent Watertown market where WPTZ has long served as the default NBC affiliate on cable. WPTZ-DT2 remained on the three digital cable systems while being added to Charter digital channel 296. It was still not carried on a subchannel of WNNE. On January 2, 2013, This TV was replaced on 5.2 by its sister network, MeTV. Both networks were owned at the time by Weigel Broadcasting.
On March 4, 2013, WPTZ's second digital subchannel assumed the CW affiliation for the Plattsburgh–Burlington market from WFFF-DT2. It continued to air MeTV programming outside CW network slots until September 2014, when MeTV was separated into its own subchannel. While it airs The CW's schedule in-pattern, The Bill Cunningham Show, which aired weekdays at 3 p.m. on many CW affiliates until its cancellation in 2016, was delayed to 12:30 a.m. until the launch of a separate MeTV subchannel. Since the main WPTZ channel also serves as one of the default NBC affiliates for Massena, New York, that area now has access to two CW affiliates when Watertown's WWTI-DT2 is included. Despite adding The CW, there had been no plans made public about WPTZ's then semi-satellite WNNE adding the network in order to increase the broadcasting radius; however, the network was ultimately transferred over to WNNE, five years later, when it entered into a channel-sharing arrangement with WPTZ. Currently, access in the Upper Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire to WNNE and WPTZ-DT3 is solely through digital cable and satellite services.
On September 15, 2014, WPTZ separated The CW and MeTV into their own subchannels, 5.2 and 5.3 respectively, but did not add them to WNNE's signal. In April 2016, the over-the-air digital signal of WPTZ-DT2 was upgraded into 720p high definition; thus offering a high definition feed for The CW for the first time in the Burlington–Plattsburgh area and a second high definition feed for The CW in Massena. In May 2016, Comcast began carrying WPTZ-DT2's high definition feed on digital channel 706 for Burlington viewers and Charter began carrying WPTZ-DT2's high definition feed on digital channel 711 for Plattsburgh viewers.
On July 22, 2018, WNNE assumed the CW affiliation previously held by the 5.2 subchannel; this was a result of WNNE shutting down operations on its pre-auction channel and commencing channel-sharing operations, effective July 22, 2018. On July 20, Hearst Television announced that WNNE would become a CW affiliate following the move. Concurrent with the move, the 5.2 subchannel was remapped to WNNE's virtual channel 31.1 under channel-sharing operations. This resolves the concerns raised years before regarding a lack of access to the WPTZ sub-channels for WNNE viewers, yet it also limits viewers in the Upper Valley to cable and satellite viewing options for NBC programming.