Establishment of channel 51 What today is WNYA can indirectly trace its history to WVUW, an un-built station on channel 51 in Pittsfield. WVUW was granted a
construction permit in 1984, but was deleted by the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1990. In October 1996,
Pappas Telecasting applied for a new permit for this allocation; however, in 2001, the FCC placed the channel up for auction. In addition to Pappas, which by then planned to use the station as an
Azteca América affiliate, bidders included Hubbard Broadcasting,
Equity Broadcasting, the
Trinity Broadcasting Network, and Venture Technologies Group. The FCC granted the construction permit and the WNYA call sign to Venture a year later. To accommodate the new WNYA, WNYT moved its
Adams translator, which had broadcast on channel 51 since 1984, to channel 38.
UPN Capital Region In February 2003, Venture Technologies signed a
joint sales agreement (JSA) with
Freedom Communications, then-owner of
CBS affiliate
WRGB (channel 6); this allowed WNYA to operate from WRGB's studios in
Niskayuna. Soon afterward, WNYA secured an affiliation with
UPN, replacing "
WEDG-TV", a cable-only station operated as a partnership of
WXXA-TV (channel 23) and
Time Warner Cable. On May 22, 2003, Venture purchased WVBX-LP (channel 39) in
Easton from Vision 3 Broadcasting, a station that a year earlier had been granted a construction permit to upgrade to
class A service and move to channel 15 from a transmitter in the Helderberg Mountains in New Scotland, in effect moving WVBX to Albany. Venture took channel 39 off-the-air that June, built the channel 15 facility, gave it the call letters WNYA-CA on June 30, 2003, and announced that the station would serve as a WNYA repeater; this created the unusual circumstance of a repeater station older than its parent station, as WVBX had signed on in 1997 as part of a network of low-power stations based at
WVBG-LP (channel 25) in Albany, which itself served as the Capital District's UPN affiliate from 1998 until the launch of "WEDG-TV" in 2000. On September 1, 2003, WNYA launched using the branding "UPN Capital Region." On February 22,
News Corporation announced that it would start up another new broadcast television network called MyNetworkTV; on March 9, it was announced that WNYA would join this network. After having not branded with a channel number during its UPN affiliation, the station chose to call itself "My TV 4 Albany" after its channel position on Time Warner Cable systems. Ironically, nowhere in
Berkshire County, Massachusetts is WNYA currently on channel 4; in
North Adams, that channel is the spot where Boston's CBS affiliate
WBZ-TV is located. After MyNetworkTV's launch on September 5, 2006, WNYA aired the last two weeks of UPN programming from 1 to 3 a.m. from Tuesday to Saturday. A few months after the affiliation change, on December 5, 2006, Freedom Communications purchased WCWN from Tribune, in effect giving it control over three stations in the Capital District. In February 2007, the joint sales agreement with WRGB was terminated, and WNYA moved to a facility in
Rotterdam that formerly housed
WMHT-FM-
TV. In December 2007, WNYA reached an agreement to carry the
New York Yankees' over-the-air television package, which had previously been carried on WXXA-TV. The station hired Dan Murphy, a former
WTEN (channel 10) sports anchor and
WOFX (980 AM) host, to host a local pregame show for Yankee telecasts and other local sports broadcasts. On April 18, 2008, WNYA launched its high definition channel on Time Warner Cable in Albany, even though it was not able to transmit its digital signal over the air until 2009. This coincided with the first Yankee baseball broadcast it had the rights to. WNYA switched to digital broadcasting as part of the transition on June 12, 2009. The Albany repeater, WNYA-CA, had a construction permit to perform a "
flash-cut" to a low-power digital signal; due to its Class A status, it was not mandated to make the transition until 2015. Around April 20, 2011, WNYA launched its first
digital subchannel in the form of Tribune Broadcasting's
Antenna TV over Channel 51.2. The new subchannel also began to be simulcast on WNYA-CA in place of WNYA's main programming.
Acquisition by Hubbard On February 25, 2013,
Hubbard Broadcasting announced that it would purchase WNYA to form a duopoly with its local NBC affiliate
WNYT, for $2.3 million, pending FCC approval. As the Capital Region does not have enough full-power stations to legally permit a duopoly, Hubbard sought a failed station waiver to acquire the station; an avenue that rival CBS affiliate WRGB had used in purchasing CW affiliate WCWN in 2006. Venture had put WNYA up for sale in 2009, but no other potential buyers came forward. The sale did not include class-A station WNYA-CA, which remained with Venture Technologies. Under a clause of the sale of WNYA that required WNYA-CA to use a new call sign that does not feature the letters "N" or "Y", The sale was consummated on July 15. WEPT-CA dropped its simulcast of WNYA-DT2 and switched to AMGTV in September 2013, ending its association with WNYA. On December 31, 2015, WNYA added
Decades on subchannel 51.3. On November 1, 2017, WNYA replaced Antenna TV with
Light TV on subchannel 51.2. ==Newscasts==