WMTW - History

History

WMTW-TV signed-on September 25, 1954 as the third television station in the Portland market. It aired an analog signal on VHF channel 8 under the ownership of Mount Washington Television, a group that included former Maine Governor Horace Hildreth. It has always been an ABC affiliate although it aired some DuMont programming for a year. The station's sign-on made Portland one of the smallest markets in the United States with three network affiliates on the analog VHF band. WMTW is also the longest-tenured primary ABC affiliate in New England.

The station originally broadcasted from a transmitter on Mount Washington in New Hampshire, the highest peak in the northeastern United States. This gave WMTW one of the largest coverage areas of any station east of the Mississippi River. In addition to its main coverage area of southern Maine and northern New Hampshire, it could also be seen in parts of New York state, Massachusetts, and Vermont. The station also had significant viewership across the Canadian border in Montreal, a city with almost five times the population of WMTW's American coverage area. As such, WMTW-TV was considered to be the ABC affiliate of record for northern Vermont and Montreal until WVNY in Burlington, Vermont signed-on in 1968. However, for some time afterward, WMTW continued to have a large audience in that area and stayed on most Montreal cable systems until the early 1990s.

The station's transmitter tower on Mount Washington had been originally designed in 1940 by Edwin Armstrong for one of the first FM radio stations in the country. WMTW built a new tower there in the 1960s but Armstrong's tower remained as a standby. Mount Washington Television sold the station to former Tonight Show host Jack Paar in 1963. Initially barred from appearing on WMTW due to contractual obligations with NBC, he later hosted several programs on the station including a Thursday night movie. In 1967, Paar sold WMTW to Mid New York Broadcasting, which changed its name to Harron Communications a decade later.

WMTW had to leave Mount Washington in 2002 due to the Federal Communications Commission's digital television mandate. The FCC requires analog stations to broadcast alongside the digital counterparts until 80% of the viewing audience can watch the digital signal. Had WMTW-DT been built on the mountain, it would have had to operate at low-power due to the lack of commercial electric power (in fact, Harron was legally the power company on the mountain). A low-powered signal would have resulted in an inadequate signal for Portland and the more populated areas of the market. As a result, WMTW built a new tower in West Baldwin and signed-off from Mount Washington for the last time on February 5, 2002. Obviously, the new transmitter site does not serve as large an area as the Mount Washington tower did but it provides a better signal to the highly populated areas of the market. Despite WMTW's departure, two FM stations continue to occupy separate broadcast facilities on the top of the mountain.

Harron announced in December 2003 that it was exiting broadcasting, and the station was sold to Hearst-Argyle Television a few months later. In 2007, WMTW dropped its longtime use of the -TV suffix which had been used since 1958. On June 12, 2009, it remained on VHF channel 8 when the analog to digital conversion was completed.