WNDY-TV - History

History

The station signed-on on November 7, 1984 as independent WMCC. Initially, it ran a lot of paid programming but slowly added classic television sitcoms, cartoons, and old movies. It was programming a traditional general entertainment format by 1987. WMCC continued to acquire more recent sitcoms and added some talk and reality shows in the early-1990s. It became a WB affiliate in 1995 and called itself on-air "INDY-TV WB 23". The station was purchased by the family of Tony George of Indianapolis Motor Speedway fame in 1995. It received its current call letters at the time of the purchase as well as a checkered-flag logo (a nod to the Speedway and its signature Indianapolis 500 race). The next year, the Hoosier Lottery awarded WNDY the rights to its programming which had aired on WTTV since 1989. That station would regain those broadcasting rights in 1999.

In 1998, WNDY swapped affiliations with WTTV and became a UPN affiliate. For part of the year, the station aired programming from both UPN and The WB. Paramount Stations Group (now CBS Television Stations) bought the station in 1999 which resulted in WNDY becoming a UPN owned-and-operated station. In October 2002, its digital signal on UHF channel 32 began broadcasting. By 2003, the station had stopped referring to itself by its channel number and simply used the name "UPN Indiana". This was done due to its location on most area cable systems on channel 10 and the UPN division of the CBS Mandate for UHF stations. A few weeks before the Fall 2003 season, WNDY had a countdown stating the amount of days until "UPN Indy" would launch. It was reported that, at the last minute, the name was ditched in favor of "UPN Indiana" to appeal to the larger audience rather than just those living in Indianapolis. Another factor was that the Indianapolis Motor Speedway had stopped this channel from using the trademarked word "Indy".

In 2005, WNDY was acquired from CBS/Viacom by the LIN TV Corporation (owners of Indianapolis stations WISH-TV and WIIH-CA). It rebranded as "WNDY UPN 23" in July 2005. On January 24, 2006, The WB and UPN announced that they would end broadcasting and merge. The new combined network would be called The CW. The letters would represent the first initial of its corporate parents, CBS (the parent company of UPN) and the Warner Bros. unit of Time Warner. On February 22, News Corporation announced that 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, not mentioned as becoming CW affiliates, another option besides becoming independent. It was also created to compete against The CW. WTTV/WTTK was chosen as the CW outlet in the Indianapolis market while WNDY joined MyNetworkTV. Accordingly, the station re-branded to "My INDY TV".

On May 18, 2007, LIN TV announced that it was exploring strategic alternatives that could have resulted in the sale of the company. On September 15, 2008, WISH-TV announced that LIN TV and Bright House Cable had not been able to reach an agreement for carriage of itself, WNDY, and WIIH-CA on the cable service. LIN TV was seeking compensation for carriage as other cable networks receive. The company had reached agreements with all television service providers in the Indianapolis area except Bright House. The agreement with Bright House expired on October 2. After the analog to digital switch occurred on June 12, 2009, WNDY's analog channel 23 location began to be used by PBS affiliate WIPB in Muncie for its digital broadcasts. WNDY was the call sign of the fictional television station in the 1990-1991 CBS series WIOU. The show pre-dated this station's adoption of the WNDY calls by about four years. The call sign was also used for the fictional Chicago radio station in the 1992 Dolly Parton film Straight Talk. WNDY was also the former call sign of radio station WBRI.