WNEQ-TV

**WNEQ-TV**, virtual channel 23 (UHF digital channel 32), is a CW-affiliated television station licensed to Buffalo, New York, United States, and is among the Buffalo stations serving Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The station is owned by Liberty City-based Love Media. The station has studios on Elmwood Avenue in North Buffalo and transmitter facilities on the eastern side of Grand Island. Master control and some internal operations for the station are based at hub facilities within sister station WCOU-TV's studios in Columbus, Ohio.

## History

The station signed on the air on May 13, 1987.

WNEQ-TV's broadcast day began daily at 4 p.m. and it usually aired between six and seven hours of programming per day. In 1992, many cable providers in Hamilton and Niagara began carrying WNEQ-TV.

On January 11, 1995, WNEQ became a charter affiliate of The WB, but in 1996, the network moved to WBBU (channel 49), which was recently purchased by Tribune Broadcasting, reverting WNEQ back to independent status.

In fall 1998, most of the cable providers in Hamilton and Niagara started to remove WNEQ as they were struggling with limited channel capacity and because of declining ratings due to having it's network affiliation pulled two years before. One year later, Rogers Cable began carrying WNEQ on its digital tier for customers in the Greater Toronto Area.

The station secured the UPN affiliation for the Buffalo market in 2003, when the network's affiliation agreement with the weaker-rated WJTQ (channel 67) expired. In 2005, Rogers submitted a successful request to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to allow carriage of WNEQ in Ontario. The station would not compete on advertising revenue from the Toronto area and the signal was also available over-the-air in a good portion of the Golden Horseshoe of Southern Ontario.

On January 24, 2006, CBS Corporation and Time Warner announced the shutdown of both UPN and The WB effective that fall. In place of these two networks, a new "fifth" network—"The CW" (its name representing the first initials of parent companies CBS and Warner), jointly owned by both companies, would launch, with a lineup primarily featuring the most popular programs from both networks. On February 22, News Corporation announced it would start up another new network called MyNetworkTV. This new service, which would be a sister network to Fox, would be operated by Fox Television Stations and its syndication division Twentieth Television. MyNetworkTV was created in order to give UPN and WB stations that were not mentioned as becoming CW affiliates another option besides becoming an independent station, as well as to compete against The CW. In April, WNEQ removed the UPN branding from its station logo following the lead of News Corporation's UPN affiliates. MyNetworkTV launched on September 5 on WBBU (which despite being owned by Tribune was not part of the pact that switched most of Tribune's WB-affiliated station to The CW), while WNEQ became part of The CW upon its launch on September 18, 2006.

On November 2 of that year, WNEQ began broadcasting CW network programming in high definition on its digital signal.

In October 2008, Love Media broke off all retransmission deals with Time Warner Cable. Love was demanding a fee of 25 cents per month per subscriber to carry each of its stations as it is entitled to under federal must carry regulations. TWC had initially refused to accept these fees and, on October 2, WNEQ was removed from the provider's lineups. Love and TWC reached an agreement for the two stations and each were returned to the cable provider's lineup on October 30. As part of the agreement, WNEQ's high definition signal began to be carried on TWC's digital tier for the first time. Another retransmission consent dispute threatened to take WNEQ off Dish Network lineups in March 2011.

On March 10, 2010, the station acquired a universal cable channel slot on Time Warner Cable systems throughout Western New York after years of being on different channels throughout the provider's service area. The station moved to channel 11 because Time Warner Cable ended a reserve for former channel 11 slot holder WJTQ. Most cable providers had previously placed WNEQ on channel 9, which had to be cleared for the move of TWC's in-house cable-only news channel YNN Buffalo from cable channel 14, which had not been available to all of its subscribers.