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CBS to Add WENY-DT as Affiliate in Elmira, N.Y.

Oct 20, 2008  •  Post A Comment

CBS has signed an affiliation agreement with WENY-DT in Elmira (Corning), N.Y., with a sign-on date effective Jan. 1, 2009.
Lilly Broadcasting of Pennsylvania owns WENY-DT, in addition to Erie, Pa.’s WSEE-TV, another CBS affiliate.
“This marks the first time that CBS has had an affiliate based in Elmira,” CBS Affiliate Relations President Diana Wilkin said. “We welcome this opportunity to not only enhance our service to our viewers in New York’s Southern Tier, but to also extend our successful relationship with Lilly Broadcasting.”
Lilly Broadcasting President and CEO Brian Lilly said, “Combining CBS’s entertainment, news and sports programming with our lineup of local news and syndicated shows creates a quality, very promotable and saleable schedule with broad appeal.”

16 Comments

  1. Is this a new station just signing on? A bit more information might be of use to readers.

  2. What is happening to WENY’s ABC affiliation?

  3. Since probably 90% of TV viewers are on cable – the big question is – will
    the s tier cable ops carry this plus WBNG is the very oldest first class TV out of Binghamton.
    I seriously doubt any serious viewer shift wil occur unless WBNG CBS 12 is dropped from Elmira DMA systems. So what did WENY & CBS accomplish with this – not much really !!

  4. WENY-DT is a new CBS station just signing on with an expected launch date later this year.
    WENY-ABC-TV also owned by Lilly Broadcasting will continue in operation.

  5. Is this a secondary multicast channel of WENY’s digital ABC affiliate? If so, it no doubt won’t be in HDTV. Will they feed cable a direct HDTV feed?
    Will cable drop WBNG….is WBNG a significantly viewed station? If so, cable can’t, can they?

  6. It is very significantly viewed.
    The question is why would a facility spend effort & money on what is already very established. Better to start the S Tier H School sports TV , or Tourism, or cooking anything that is hyper local & highly focused on the DMA.
    It’s not the big netwrok deal anymore it is getting down deep locally – ask hearst Argyle & they will confirm it.
    Hope Lilly & his banks have deep pockets cause this has bad move written all over it .
    UGH is any one left with an original idea in TV ??

  7. Great news for The Southern Tier we will finally get a local CBS affiliate providing local news , sports and I am sure they will carry the NFL games that we want to see not what Binghamton wants to watch ! Thanks Mr. Lilly !

  8. If they run it in the same manner as they run the abc station, then I would prefer watching WBNG from Binghamton. I think they are owned by tightwads who dont want to invest in HD. They broadcast out of an old garage.

  9. This a mistake, WENY-ABC is horrible and IMO 2nd rate operation that looks like they are broadcasting out of one’s basement and on top of that there is no HD feed still after saying they were going HD years ago.
    I have no faith in WENY and now being a CBS affiliate as well I expects that the new CBS channel is be sub par and that ABC will continue to be as bad as ever if not worse.
    I’m also sure this means no HD for a good long time.

  10. To WENY Viewer:
    I suspect nothing will happen to WENY’s ABC affiliation. More likely, WENY will seek local exclusivity and you’ll lose WBNG from the cable lineup (like what previously has occured in Elmira with WICZ and what was then WMGC)
    Here’s a quick, dirty and oversimplified explanation:
    In the old days of analog, a station could broadcast only one programming source on its signal. Channel 36 was ABC and nothing else.
    Now, digital broadcasting allows for many more to be broadcast on subcarriers. That’s how the former channel 30 became channel 18.2. WETM also owns your former UPN affiliate and has continued running it as an independent station.
    Of course, UPN merged with the WB to for the CW. WENY already has your CW station. Your Fox and MyTV stations are similarly co-owned.
    The stations also can send multiple signals to the cable company regardless of whether they actually broadcast in digital. I’m not in the Elmira area anymore, so I can’t confirm if any of your stations actually have gone digital.
    So your local affiliations should shake out like this:
    WETM: NBC, independent 18.2
    WENY: ABC, CBS, CW (actually makes sense given CBS’ status as partner in CW)
    WYDC: Fox, MyTV
    And there’s a Univision station in Ithaca. I think that covers them all.

  11. WENY is currently *not* digital, they were assigned analog 36 / digital 55 but channel 55 is the one that MediaFLO (Qualcomm) is using to broadcast video to mobile ‘phones. The FCC therefore allowed WENY to stay analog-only until 2009, just so the US government could get the MediaFLO dollars sooner.
    If WENY isn’t digital, odds are it isn’t HDTV either – at least terrestrially. Dunno about cable.

  12. Actually, all Elmira digital TV is garbage. WETM-DT is on channel 2 with a low-power TV signal (under 300 watts) because anything resembling a real signal on that frequency would interfere with WKTV Utica. WYDC-DT is worse, with 450 watts of UHF on channel 50. (The largest LPTV digital UHF station could have up to 15000 watts ERP, by comparison). WYDC is rubbish in analog, too. WNYI might have full national coverage on satellite (123°W, Ku) but on the ground it’s a substandard low-power analog only. The only decent -DT signal is WSKA (25kW) and that’s a repeater of the Binghamton station, WSKG.
    Any reason why Elmira can’t be put out of its misery now?

  13. Time warner is so crappy now. All we get is reruns reruns and more reruns

  14. This totally SUCKS – we’re going to trade in WBNG – a first-class CBS operation from Binghamton, with a ride-along CBS signal on WENY, which is as unprofessional an operation as you could imagine. We will NOT be getting new news and sports coverage… they’re going to simulcast the pathetic WENY news team… they literally cover their live feeds and local sports with VHS home video cameras. I am not kidding – we see their people at the various high school sports (those that they actually cover) WENY pays minimum wage and gets the pathetic bottom-feeders nobody else will hire. Also – no news at all on the weekend from WENY.
    Worst of all – we’ll be completely shut off from our neighbors down rt.17… er, 86, in Binghamton. A lot of us have family and friends in Broome County and have appreciated the news of local events from there all these years. We’ll still PBS on WSKG, but they don’t have local news coverage.
    RIP WBNG – we’ll miss you in Elmira

  15. This new station just doesn’t do it for me, and we are really ticked off that WBNGTV from Binghamton is now off the air.
    the new station has no weekend news and the staff are really rather unprofessional. God!! I sincerely hope the powers that be bring back WBNGTV.

  16. WENY sucks! I live in the Elmira area and WENY can’t handle anything this big. They can’t run with the big dogs, their to little! They chop up Y&R really bad. You never know what you’ll be watching but it won’t be Y&R. After Y&R is over the other soaps come on okay, must be they don’t like Y&R so we can’t watch it, however we can watch it on Soap net. I hope they don’t plan on buying that because I don’t know how I would be able to watch it then. I’m glad I don’t watch any other shows on CBS-WENY. Sell it now to someone else before it’s to late to save it!

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