WTBY signed on April 6, 1981, as WFTI-TV, originally licensed to the city of Poughkeepsie, New York, in the Hudson Valley region. The station was initially owned by Family Television, Inc., founded by Keith Houser in 1979, and headquartered in the Poughkeepsie Plaza Mall on US 9 in Poughkeepsie. WFTI's early programming included reruns of The Lone Ranger and The Cisco Kid, and the station originated coverage of Army Cadets sports (except the Army–Navycollege football game); Family TV also produced Valley Magazine, a nightly 30-minute program with interviews of local celebrities, such as James Cagney.
After Irving Trust, the station's sole banking source, experienced financial problems and prematurely called the station's loan in 1982 (Irving Trust was ultimately shut down by the Federal Reserve), Family Television sold the station to the Trinity Broadcasting Network in June 1982,[4] though the sale would not be completed until over a year later, in July 1983. TBN then changed the station's call letters on October 4, 1983, to the present WTBY-TV and moved the station's operations to studios in the village of Fishkill. Not long after taking control of the station, TBN co-founders Paul and Jan Crouch helped sign WTBY on the air under TBN ownership with a special edition of the network's flagship program Praise the Lord, broadcast from the new Fishkill studios.
While Poughkeepsie is part of the New York City television market, WTBY's over-the-air signal could only be seen clearly in the northern fringes of the area. Most of the core of the New York area, including the Five Boroughs, got only a
Adirondacks. Both stations ceased broadcasting due to declining support, which has been attributed to the digital transition, with W52DF shutting down on March 13[5] and W47CM shutting down one month later.[6] W52DF's license, along with 43 other silent TBN repeaters, was canceled on December 1, 2011, for remaining silent over a year.[7]
Until 2007, WTBY was not carried on the two main cable systems in New York City itself (
Spectrum [formerly Time Warner Cable]), and its cable penetration is still spotty at best on the New Jersey and Connecticut sides of the market. It is not available on DirecTV or Dish Network
's New York City local feeds; only the national version is available, as is the case with all TBN-owned stations.
Despite its modest cable penetration in the area, TBN has poured significant resources into WTBY in recent years. In 2007, when TBN opened a new studio in the former Century Center for the Performing Arts near Union Square in Manhattan, WTBY's studio/office operations were moved to that location.
WTBY-TV elected to keep
UHF channel 54, on October 1, 2008.[8] The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 27, using virtual channel
54.
The shutdown initially caused the station to be dropped from Service Electric's systems in New Jersey due to difficulty in receiving the signal at the cable headend. Service Electric replaced it with the national TBN service.
Trinity Broadcasting entered WTBY-TV's broadcast frequency into the FCC's
community of license moved from Poughkeepsie to Jersey City, New Jersey, as WDVB's transmitter location at the Empire State Building would leave WTBY unable to service Poughkeepsie with a viewable over-the-air signal. The FCC approved the license move from Poughkeepsie to Jersey City on September 21, 2017. In late January 2018, TBN began the process of purchasing WDVB-CD from their owners, allowing full control of the entire channel space.[11]
Local programming
Locally produced programs included versions of Praise the Lord and Joy in Our Town, a
