| Smithtown, New York | |
|---|---|
| Channels | Digital: 23 (UHF) Virtual: 67.1 (PSIP) Telefutura 67.2 Univision |
| Affiliations | TeleFutura Univision |
| Owner | Univision Communications, Inc. (Univision New York, LLC) |
| First air date | November 18, 1973 |
| Call letters' meaning | TeleFuTura New York |
| Former callsigns | WSNL-TV (1973-1987) WHSI (1987-2001) |
| Former channel number(s) | Analog: 67 (UHF, 1973-2009) |
| Former affiliations | independent (1973-1975) silent (1975-1979) independent (1979-1987) Wometco Home Theater (1977-1985) HSN (1987-2001) independent (2001-2002) |
| Transmitter power | 150 kW |
| Height | 203.7 m (668 ft) |
| Class | DT (Digital Television) |
| Facility ID | 60553 |
| Website | TeleFutura |
WFTY-DT is one of two TeleFutura network-Owned stations for the New York City market, along with WFUT-DT. Owned by the Univision Broadcast Group, the station is licenced to Smithtown, New York and serves Long Island.
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WFTY first signed on November 18, 1973 as WSNL-TV, transmitting on channel 67 out of Patchogue. The station was begun on the premise of there being over three million people living on Long Island who got little local television news coverage; with all the network affiliates based in Manhattan, it was rare to see more than one or two news stories a day about Long Island.
WSNL went on the air with a half-hour early evening newscast and a full hour at 10pm, in addition to coverage of high school sports, along with some off-network reruns and first-run syndicated programming. One of the more noteworthy series among this batch was the Phil Donahue Show, which had been in national syndication since 1972, but had gone unseen in the crucial New York market until that point, and after the station's demise, would not find another outlet until WNBC picked it up in 1977. The station also carried the games of the short-lived New York Stars of the World Football League in 1974.
Among WSNL's locally-produced offerings were:
The news department of 18 people used the very earliest form of portable videotape equipment, which only ran off AC or inverters in cars, and not off batteries. This greatly restricted local video coverage to the length of a power cord. In this era before satellites were used for TV distribution, the station employed a courier who used a motorcycle nightly to race from Manhattan with a tape of national and international news stories for the late news.
After a year of operation, inadequate revenue meant the cutback to five-minute news briefs several times a day and the department shrunk to just a few employees before the station went bankrupt and signed off for the last time on June 13, 1975.
WSNL signed on again four years later, on December 4, 1979, simulcasting Newark's WWHT (now WFUT) with a mixed independent/subscription television format, carrying Wometco Home Theater. Less than two months later, on January 30, 1980, an electrical fire nearly destroyed the station's studios, forcing WSNL to again cease broadcasting, this time until July 1980.
In 1985, WSNL and WWHT discontinued the independent and subscription programming in favor of music videos. By the fall of 1986, the stations became WHSI and WHSE when they were sold to the Home Shopping Network, whose programming ran on both stations for the next fifteen years.
In the late 1990s, HSN's broadcasting arm (Silver King Television) planned to switch their stations to an independent format, with WHSE/WHSI slated to make the change in 2001. Late in 2000, however, USA Broadcasting, who owned HSN by that time, decided to sell their stations to Univision, meaning that WHSI would (instead of returning to an independent format) switch to AIN/UATV, networks generally used by low-powered stations, before becoming a charter affiliate of Univision's new TV network Telefutura on January 14, 2002, re-called as WFTY. The call letters had been formerly used by Washington, DC CW affiliate WDCW, while they were an independent station; the calls had stood for that station's channel number, 50.
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