Permitting
In 1979, interest coalesced again around channel 49, with applicants investigating the possibility of building a station to broadcast subscription television (STV) programming to paying customers.[7][8] The first formal application filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) came from Anax Corporation in June.[9] A group of California investors doing business as the Great Erie County Telecasting Corporation made its application in October,[10] followed by Channel 49 Buffalo Television, owned by an investor consortium from Baltimore,[11] the minority-owned Unific Broadcasting Company, and Bison City Television 49, whose principals were primarily from St. Louis.[12]
In 1981, the FCC designated the applications for comparative hearing; an FCC administrative law judge initially dismissed Bison City's application because of a failure to establish ownership, but the company successfully appealed.[13][14] The field thinned considerably when Unific settled with Anax, Great Erie County, and Channel 49 Buffalo Television at the start of the hearing, leaving Unific and Bison City the only contenders for the permit.[15] While Unific believed its local ownership and proposal to feature programming for the Black community in Buffalo made it a superior applicant,[16] administrative law judge Walter C. Miller selected Bison City over Unific; the primary reason was that the latter company had asked for four amendments to its financial qualifications due to an inability to secure financing.[17]
Bison City made some progress at building channel 49; it attempted to secure financing to go on air in 1984, and it even purchased some syndicated programs for the station to air.[18] In 1985, the station secured a tower site in Colden over the objections of some local residents,[19][20] and Bison City engaged the services of Media Central of Chattanooga, Tennessee, to build the facilities on its behalf, with the call sign WNYB-TV selected.[21]
TVX: ownership but not operation
Lacking the financial resources to build the station, Bison City sold 80 percent interest in the WNYB construction permit to TVX Broadcast Group, a chain of independent TV stations, in 1985.[22] TVX proceeded with construction, but a change in its business plan put the station on hold. In November 1986, TVX acquired five major-market independents from Taft Broadcasting. Including the under-construction WNYB-TV but excluding WNRW-TV in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which it was selling, TVX already owned eight stations; the Taft deal put TVX one station over the 12-station limit of the time. TVX announced its intention to sell the WNYB-TV construction permit.[23]
In May 1987, TVX reached a deal to sell WNYB-TV to a subsidiary of the First Allied Corporation, owned by Malcolm Glazer of Rochester. First Allied, in turn, announced that WNYB-TV would begin broadcasting on July 1 from the under-construction studios on Hertel Avenue.[24] However, by late June, the sale to First Allied had fallen through, and the start of the station had been delayed until September to align with the start of the new television season as well as contracts for much of the new outlet's programming.
Sabres ownership
Needing to dispose of a ready-to-operate television station, TVX reportedly approached the Buffalo Sabres, the city's National Hockey League (NHL) franchise, among other groups. By then, the Sabres were the only U.S.-based NHL team whose games still aired on a major network affiliate—NBC affiliate WGRZ (channel 2). Although WGRZ had been the television home of the Sabres for a decade, its interest in renewing the contract waned because it had to preempt NBC programming for Sabres games.[26] The Sabres formed Aud Enterprises (named for Buffalo Memorial Auditorium, popularly known as "the Aud") as a subsidiary to buy WNYB-TV; the purchase was announced on July 20, 1987.[27] While WGRZ nominally had the right to match channel 49's offer to air the Sabres, the franchise deliberately made it difficult for channel 2 to do so by announcing plans to increase the number of televised games from 24 to 29. This cleared the way for the Sabres to effectively take their local telecasts in-house.[28][29]
Consolidation with WUTV; sale to TCT
In August 1989, Norman Lear's Act III Broadcasting moved to purchase WUTV from Citadel.[37] However, it soon put the purchase on hold temporarily to negotiate a second acquisition: that of WNYB-TV's programming and facilities from the Sabres.[38] Act III had pulled off a similar station consolidation the year before in Richmond, Virginia, when it bought WRLH-TV as well as the programming inventory of competitor WVRN-TV, which then shut down.[39]
On August 29, 1989, Act III announced that it would buy WUTV along with WNYB-TV's programming and Fox affiliation, which would move to channel 29. Simultaneously, the Sabres announced that channel 49's transmitting facility would be sold to Tri-State Christian Television (TCT) of Marion, Illinois. In exchange, Sabres owners Seymour Knox and Robert Swados received equity in WUTV and would move their road games from channel 49 to channel 29, where they would have the exposure on Canadian cable systems that WNYB-TV had lacked since launching.
Grant ownership
The structure of the purchase of WNYB-TV by TCT incentivized Tri-State Christian Television to continue the station as a non-profit for five years by including a series of sliding scale payments to the Sabres that increased if the station began accepting commercial advertising or was sold to a commercial broadcaster. With the five years up, in December 1995, TCT made a deal with Grant Broadcasting. The deal would see Grant buy channel 49 from TCT, which would receive $12 million and the construction permit for WTJA (channel 26) in Jamestown, which had last broadcast in 1991.[47][48][49]
Speculation immediately pointed to Grant using channel 49 to bring The WB to Buffalo, which was confirmed in June 1996.[50] While TCT began the process of building a new physical plant to bring channel 26 back into service and moved the WNYB call letters there,[51]
Sinclair ownership
Grant Broadcasting sold WNYO-TV to Sinclair Broadcast Group—the descendant of the original Baltimore group that had sought the channel in 1979—for $51.5 million in 2000. The company had previously reportedly turned down an offer from Granite Broadcasting, owner of ABC affiliate WKBW-TV. This formed a duopoly with WUTV and came after Sinclair had previously backed out of a plan to acquire channel 23 in the city.[57] Unlike with channel 23, in acquiring WNYO-TV, it received an existing station with a building, programming, and staff.[58] The deal also allowed Sinclair to program channel 49 with shows it had purchased with the intent of airing them on channel 23.[59]
In 2006, when The WB and UPN merged to form The CW
