WUNI


WUNI, virtual channel 66, is an Univision-owned television station serving Boston, Massachusetts, United States that is licensed to Marlborough. The station is owned by the Univision Local Media subsidiary of Univision Communications, as part of a duopoly with Derry, New Hampshire-licensed True Crime Network affiliate WWJE-DT ; Entravision Communications, which owns Worcester, Massachusetts-licensed UniMás affiliate WUTF-TV, operates WUNI under a joint sales agreement. WUNI and WWJE share studios and transmitter facilities on Parmenter Road in Hudson; under the JSA, master control and some internal operations of WUNI are based at WUTF's studios on 4th Avenue in Needham.

History

As an English-language independent station

The station first signed on the air on January 1, 1970 as WSMW-TV, an independent station that featured English-language general entertainment programs including old movies, cartoons, religious shows, a cooking show, science fiction shows, dramas, as well as sitcoms. Though WSMW-TV was within the Boston market, it was far enough from Boston itself that the station was able to air some of the same shows as the Boston stations, in a similar situation to WMUR-TV, the ABC affiliate in Manchester, New Hampshire. The station's call letters stood for State Mutual in Worcester, the corporate owner of the station.
WSMW also broadcast sports programs; from its debut through the end of the 1971–72 NBA season, the station was the television home of the Boston Celtics. In 1970 and 1971, WSMW broadcast New England Patriots preseason games. WSMW also offered extensive coverage of college basketball throughout the 1970s, mostly games of the College of the Holy Cross and Assumption College, with some Boston College, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Bentley College games included on the schedule. The broadcast team of play-by-play man Bob Fouracre and analyst Bob Cousy worked these games. During the college football season, the station carried a taped two-hour broadcast of a game from earlier in the day on Saturday nights at 10:30 p.m. These games were typically Holy Cross home games, and when Holy Cross was on the road, games from UMass. Fouracre worked these games, and the analyst most of the time was Gino Cappelletti. WSMW also broadcast Bay State Bowling, a weekly candlepin bowling program on Sunday evenings for most of the 1970s, which was hosted by Fouracre.
In 1970, shortly after the cancellation of the long-running Bozo's Circus on WHDH-TV, WSMW-TV debuted their own version of the Bozo the Clown series franchise, Bozo's Big Top. Tom Matzell played Bozo, alongside Gene Sanocki as Bozo's sidekick Professor Tweetyfoofer. Local children were featured on the program daily, with many waiting up to one year or more for their chance to be on the show. This version aired until 1974.
In the fall of 1980, channel 27 began running the subscription television service Preview at night after 7 p.m. Early in 1983, the station dropped all of its entertainment programs and began running Preview 21 hours a day, with the remaining hours devoted to religious and public affairs programming. In the spring of 1985, WSMW cut Preview's broadcast hours down to 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. on weekdays and after 3 p.m. on weekends; it also brought back some general entertainment programs. Hill Broadcasting bought the station in late 1985, and changed the station's call letters to WHLL. At that time, WHLL dropped Preview and reverted to being a general-entertainment independent full-time.
Initially, WHLL's schedule consisted of B-grade movies, drama series, public domain cartoons and a few sitcoms, as well as religious programs. While the station again initially shared some of its programming with Boston stations, by the fall of 1986 the duplication had largely been eliminated, and WHLL began to market itself as a Boston station. When cartoons and sitcoms were gone around 1987, the station began running preempted network programming from NBC, ABC, and CBS, which had previously aired on Boston's WQTV and started airing BBC and Nine Network shows as well as airing new cartoons. The graphics were made by Cranston/Csuri and Pacific Data Images in 1989, which was less expense than BBC has. WHLL also began running some first-run syndicated shows by 1988, as well as a good amount of religious programming. During the station's tenure as WHLL, it employed WMJX radio personality David Allan Boucher as its booth announcer.

Addition of Spanish programming and Univision affiliation

In 1992, the station added Spanish-language programming as a part-time affiliate of Telemundo, with the network's programming running from 4 or 5 p.m. until about 1 a.m. By 1993, when the Jasas Corporation acquired the Hill Broadcasting stations, WHLL ran Spanish-language programs after noon; much of the remaining English-language programming consisted of preempted network shows and religious programs. That year, the station became an Univision affiliate and changed its call letters to WUNI. In 1995, the station began carrying Spanish language programming full-time. The station was purchased by Entravision Communications in 2000.
On February 18, 2011, Rhode Island cable provider Full Channel TV, Inc. dropped WUNI from its systems and replaced the station with Univision's national feed on its digital cable tier; the impetus for the removal was a breakdown in negotiations over claims that Entravision demanded "a 33% increase in retransmission fees" as a cash payment to renew its carriage deal with WUNI.
On December 4, 2017, as part of a channel swap made by Entravision Communications, WUNI and sister station WUTF swapped channel numbers, with WUNI moving to digital channel 27 and virtual channel 66.

Digital television

Digital channels

The station's digital signal is multiplexed:
ChannelVideoAspectPSIP Short NameProgramming
66.11080iWUNIMain WUNI programming / Univision
66.2480iBounceBounce TV
66.3480iGetTVGetTV
66.4480iGritGrit

Analog-to-digital conversion

WUNI shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 27, on June 12, 2009, the official date in which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal continued to broadcast on its pre-transition UHF channel 29. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 27.

WUNI-TV tower

The WUNI-TV tower is a former television broadcast tower located in Boylston, Massachusetts. It is the tallest broadcast tower in Massachusetts, standing above ground level, and above mean sea level. The tower is owned by Entravision Communications and formerly broadcast WUNI until its move to Hudson.

News operation

WUNI presently broadcasts 2½ hours of locally produced newscasts each week. As WSMW, the station produced a nightly 6 p.m. newscast. This program was anchored by Doug White; Walter Cryan of WPRI-TV in Providence, Rhode Island liked White's work on the newscast and hired him away from WSMW-TV; White subsequently became a longtime news anchor at another Providence station, WJAR.
On April 1, 2003, WUNI launched a half-hour local newscast, Noticias Univision Nueva Inglaterra, at 6 p.m. Sara Suarez was brought from Univision's Denver owned-and-operated station KCEC to serve as anchor and news director. Angel Salcedo, who hosted WUNI's public affairs program Enfoque Latino for several years, was chosen as Suarez's co-anchor. However, Salcedo left the station shortly afterwards, leaving Suarez as the sole anchor until Carlos Ruben Zapata was hired as Salcedo's replacement. In 2005, Zapata left the station and eventually hired Eduardo Guerrero as co-anchor late that year. Before the newscast debuted, the station signed a news share agreement with New England Cable News, in which the regional cable news channel provided news footage. In addition, several commercial spots for NECN aired on WUNI and Telefutura-affiliated sister station WUTF-TV, targeted at both stations' Hispanic audience.
The agreement with NECN expired in mid-2005, WUNI then signed a content sharing agreement with CBS owned-and-operated station WBZ-TV. WBZ is acknowledged with an on-air credit when news footage supplied by the station appears on WUNI's newscasts, as well as at the end of the broadcast, before the copyright tag.
In April 2007, WUNI began producing news updates under the title Despierta Boston, during Univision's morning news/talk program Despierta América at :25 minutes past the hour from 7 to 9 a.m. The station used a modified version of the Despierta America logo branding, while using an alteration of the graphics and music package used on the 6 p.m. newscast. While Despierta Boston was relatively successful, economic problems led to Entravision discontinuing the morning updates in early 2009. The station also laid off Eduardo Guerrero and 10-year veteran sports journalist Omar Cabrera.
On July 14, 2007, the station began airing the weekend edition of Univision-owned San Juan, Puerto Rico station WLII's newscast Las Noticias Univision; this was subsequently dropped.

Notable former on-air staff