Founded August 1987 | ||
Branding WMBC TV 63 (general)
WMBC News (newscasts) Channels Digital: 18 (UHF)
Virtual: 63 (PSIP) Affiliations .1: Independent
.2: CGNTV
.5: NTDTV
.7: Aliento Vision
.8: WDNJ
.9: KCBN Owner Mountain Broadcasting Corporation First air date April 26, 1993; 23 years ago (1993-04-26) | ||
WMBC-TV, channel 63, is an independent television station licensed to Newton, New Jersey, USA, serving the New York City metropolitan area. Founded and owned by the Mountain Broadcasting Corporation (whose initials serve as the station's call letters), the station's studios are located in West Caldwell, New Jersey, with its transmitter located in Lake Hopatcong, New Jersey.
Contents
The station's lineup consists of brokered ethnic programs, a weekday one-hour newscast (composed mainly of repackaged CNN stories), infomercials and children's programs to satisfy the Federal Communications Commission's "educational/informational" requirements And stories.
History
Mountain Broadcasting was founded in 1985 by a group of Korean Americans, led by the Reverend Sun Young Joo of Wayne, New Jersey. The group secured a construction permit from the FCC to build channel 63 in 1987, and the station began operations on April 26, 1993, with a Christian religious format, running mostly programs from FamilyNet. Later in 1993, the station also began running public domain movies and film shorts from Main Street TV, along with FamilyNet programs.
WMBC had simulcast NBC's flagship station WNBC for XFL games, and in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. In 1996, when New York City-owned WNYC-TV (channel 31, now WPXN-TV) dropped its ethnic, foreign-language television programming following its sale to private interests, many of these programs were picked up by WMBC-TV. WMBC also dropped FamilyNet and Main Street TV programming and began to air more infomercials and religious shows directly from ministries. By 1997, it ran a blend of religion and infomercials during the day and ethnic shows at night and on Saturdays. It was also running several hours a week of educational kids' shows, and began producing a local newscast.
WMBC had an extremely weak over-the-air signal in New York City, but with a new antenna on the Empire State Building, it can be seen more clearly. The station is also carried on most of the cable providers in that market, including Time Warner Cable and Cablevision. Its signal was dropped from DirecTV's New York City local stations package on December 31, 2005; however, DirecTV resumed carriage of WMBC in early 2009.
Digital channels
The station's digital channel is multiplexed:
WMBC-TV also operates a Mobile DTV feed of subchannel 63.1, broadcasting at 0.92 Mbit/s. This is the lowest bitrate of any New York City television station's mobile feed.
Analog-to-digital conversion
WMBC-TV discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over UHF channel 63, on February 17, 2009, to conclude the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 18, using PSIP to display WMBC-TV's virtual channel as 63 on digital television receivers, which was among the high band UHF channels (52-69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition.