WMBC-TV


WMBC-TV, virtual channel 63, is an independent television station licensed to Newton, New Jersey, United States and serving the New York metropolitan area. The station is owned by the Mountain Broadcasting Corporation. WMBC-TV's studios are located in West Caldwell, New Jersey. Its primary transmitter is located on the campus of Montclair State University, with a secondary transmitter atop the Empire State Building in midtown Manhattan.
The station's lineup consists of brokered ethnic and religious programs, a half-hour weekday newscast, infomercials and children's programs to satisfy the Federal Communications Commission 's "educational/informational" requirements.

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.
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In 1996, when New York City-owned WNYC-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.
In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the station temporarily simulcast NBC's flagship station WNBC.
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 Charter Spectrum and Optimum. 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 television

Digital channels

The station's digital signal 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 that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition.