CTV invades America The first license for channel 26 in Jamestown was granted to WNYP in 1966. The station's majority shareholder was
Lowell W. "Bud" Paxson, who at the time owned Jamestown's
WKSN radio and later co-founded the Home Shopping Network (
HSN). It was the first American television station to
affiliate with a Canadian network, signing a deal with
CTV. Since the station could not afford a direct feed, station engineers switched to and from the signal of CTV's
flagship CFTO-TV (channel 9) in
Toronto whenever network programming was airing. WNYP was Paxson's first venture into television. WNYP quickly became notorious and almost legendary among Western New York's broadcast community for technical gaffes and programming mishaps. For instance, the station showed the same episode of
The Aquanauts several times, every day at the same time, over a two-week period. Also, the equipment used to pick up the off-air signal from CFTO would sometimes relay the video from another station broadcasting on VHF channel 9 instead (such as
ABC affiliate
WNYS-TV in
Syracuse or
CBS affiliate
WWTV in
Cadillac, Michigan) due to
tropospheric propagation overwhelming CFTO's signal. Often, when CFTO programming actually was being rebroadcast, the station switcher failed to drop CFTO's identification to display the WNYP callsign, which was considered a violation of
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules. Inexplicably, the audio line from a Jamestown radio station could sometimes be heard in the background when CTV programming was airing. Paxson also earned significant animus for airing programming from
CHCH-TV (channel 11) and
CBC Television's
CBLT (channel 5) without permission. Although it had been legal to broadcast foreign programming in the United States without permission as a result of laws passed during
World War II, he forgot to secure
copyrights for the Canadian shows, and the programs' copyright holders won judgments against WNYP for infringement. Since CTV, then as now, relies largely on American programming, Buffalo's
"Big 3" U.S. network affiliates—WBEN-TV (channel 4, now
WIVB-TV); WGR-TV (channel 2, now
WGRZ); and
WKBW-TV (channel 7)—threatened legal action in early 1969. Faced with the loss of its primary source of programming, WNYP cut back its local newscasts, laid off staff, and briefly attempted to use a prototype of what would become HSN's on-air product sales strategy to stay afloat. It briefly started to identify as WJTV, but quickly reverted to WNYP because
a station in
Jackson, Mississippi, already had those call letters. The death knell for the station sounded with the announcement that
WUTV would sign on from Buffalo in 1970. Buffalo was not big enough at the time to support two
independent stations, so Paxson opted to take the station off the air. (Paxson later started the Pax TV network, now known as
Ion, which broadcasts on
WPXJ-TV (channel 51) in the market; coincidentally, Pax/Ion has also imported much of its programming from CTV over the course of its history.)
Later incarnations After going dark, the station's equipment was sold to
Elmira ABC affiliate
WENY-TV (channel 36), who used much of it to aid in its launch. The channel 26 allocation was used for much of the 1970s and 1980s by a low-power experimental
Appalachian Television Service "translator" relay station (W26AA) of
WNED-TV from Buffalo, operated by the regional
Board of Cooperative Educational Services, which was able to originate local programming from studios in
Fredonia. Channel 26 is the last remaining survivor of WNED-TV's once massive translator network that had several repeaters scattered throughout the Southern Tier of Western New York; all of the others were shut down by 2012. A new license was re-issued to a new group years later, and channel 26 signed on again on September 24, 1988, under the new call letters WTJA. Part of the station's programming lineup duplicated those on the Buffalo stations. It operated on a low budget, heavily relying on
public domain material, and the station was virtually ignored by local advertisers. Buffalo-area cable providers refused to carry the station because its signal was barely acceptable even under the best conditions; its "
Grade B" signal coverage barely reached the southern Buffalo suburbs. Under the circumstances, the station never thrived, and once again went dark in 1991.
TCT arrives Grant Broadcasting purchased the license in 1995. Rather than immediately putting the station back on the air, Grant negotiated with
Marion, Illinois–based Tri-State Christian Television, owner of WNYB (channel 49), for the channel 49 license, in exchange for the channel 26 license, cash and a new, more powerful broadcasting facility in Arkwright. The facility featured one of the tallest towers in the region, atop one of the highest hills of western New York State. This changed channel 26 from having a very poor signal to one of the largest coverage areas in the Northeast. It provided at least secondary coverage from
Erie, Pennsylvania, to the southwest suburbs of Toronto. Tri-State accepted and on January 10, 1997, it took over the channel 26 license and moved the WNYB intellectual unit there. Grant in turn took over channel 49, which became
WB affiliate
WNYO-TV; it became a
MyNetworkTV affiliate in 2006 when The WB merged with
UPN to form
CW.
End of local operations In June 2018, after more than 21 years, TCT announced it had ceased local programming and was placing its former studios on Big Tree Road in
Orchard Park up for sale. The change came with the elimination of the FCC's Main Studio Rule earlier in the year and a decision by TCT to consolidate all programming operations at the network's headquarters in Marion, Illinois. ==Technical information==