WICZ-TV: Fox 40 in Binghamton, New York
WICZ-TV, channel 40, branded Fox 40, is the Fox affiliate for Binghamton, New York, and the Southern Tier. Owned by Deltavision Media, it also carries MyNetworkTV programming on its second subchannel, branded My 8, and Ion Television on its third. The station maintains studios on Vestal Parkway East in Vestal and a transmitter on Ingraham Hill Road in the town of Binghamton, broadcasting digitally on VHF channel 7 while viewers select it as channel 40. Signed on in 1957 as WINR-TV, an NBC affiliate, it spent almost four decades with NBC before switching to Fox in 1996. Its call letters honour a former owner, its tower site was built by the tower-manufacturing company that once owned it, and its website is wicz.com.
Binghamton's Second Station: WINR-TV
The station signed on on November 1, 1957, as WINR-TV, the Binghamton area's second television station, broadcasting in analogue on UHF channel 40. It was originally owned by the then Rochester-based Gannett Company, which had purchased the station's construction permit together with WINR radio, 680 AM, an NBC radio affiliate, in January that year. The WINR stations formed part of a newspaper-broadcast combination with Gannett's Binghamton Press, which worked to complete channel 40's construction and used its own pages to teach readers how to receive the new UHF signal — a real challenge in 1957, when many sets needed converters for UHF. At sign-on, WINR-TV was primarily an NBC affiliate, though it also carried some ABC programming until WBJA-TV, channel 34 and now WIVT, went on the air in 1962 and gave Binghamton its own ABC outlet.
Stainless, Ingraham Hill and the WICZ Name
On July 30, 1970, Gannett announced it would sell its Binghamton broadcasting interests while keeping the newspaper. Broadcast tower manufacturer Stainless, Inc. acquired WINR-TV as part of that divestiture. When the sale was approved, the station changed its call letters on April 7, 1971, to the current WICZ-TV, taken from the name of Stainless's owner, Henry Guzewicz. That autumn the station moved to an 870-foot tower on Ingraham Hill, having previously shared a transmitter location with WINR radio; the Ingraham Hill site remains its transmitter home today. There is a fitting symmetry in a station owned by a tower manufacturer moving onto a substantial new tower of its own, and the Stainless name remained attached to the licence for decades — long after the 1971 call change, the station's owner was still known as Stainless Broadcasting.
The Switch from NBC to Fox in 1996
In November 1995, WICZ-TV announced it would drop NBC and switch to Fox, saying the change would let it expand its news programming. The station already had a secondary relationship with Fox through the Fox Kids block, which had led it to preempt much of NBC's schedule, particularly its daytime soap operas, in Fox's favour. Before the switch, Fox had no strong over-the-air signal in Binghamton itself: the nearest affiliates, in Syracuse and Scranton, were weakened by the area's rugged terrain, and most Fox programming reached local viewers only on cable. The affiliation change took place on April 4, 1996, as WICZ's NBC contract expired. NBC programming was then seen locally on cable through a version of Elmira's WETM-TV, and the network regained an over-the-air Binghamton affiliate a year later when WETM's owners bought a low-power station and made it a semi-satellite. WICZ has been Fox 40 ever since.
Northwest Broadcasting and the Stainless Legacy
Stainless, whose holdings by then included its tower manufacturing business, WICZ-TV and a station in Bend, Oregon, was sold to Northwest Broadcasting for $17 million in 1997. Northwest sold the Stainless tower company itself to SpectraSite Holdings in 1999, but it continued to own WICZ under the Stainless Broadcasting name. In the late 1990s WICZ added a secondary affiliation with UPN; in 2000 Northwest bought a low-power channel 10 station, renamed it WBPN-LP, and moved UPN programming there — the predecessor of the MyNetworkTV service now carried on WICZ's own second subchannel as My 8. In September 2013 it was announced that Mission Broadcasting would acquire WICZ-TV and WBPN-LP, with operations to be taken over by Nexstar, but Stainless withdrew the licence assignment application on March 18, 2015, after that deal was cancelled, leaving Northwest in control for several more years.
Through Cox and Imagicomm to Deltavision
In February 2019 Reuters reported that Apollo Global Management had agreed to acquire Brian Brady's television portfolio and merge it with Cox Media Group; filings the following month confirmed the new group, initially called Terrier Media, would acquire Northwest Broadcasting, and in June 2019 it was announced the combined company would operate as Cox Media Group. The transaction was completed on December 17, 2019, bringing WICZ under the Cox name. On March 29, 2022, Cox announced it would sell WICZ-TV and 17 other stations to Imagicomm Communications, an affiliate of the parent company of the INSP cable channel, for $488 million; the sale was completed on August 1, 2022. Imagicomm's time in broadcasting was brief: on April 8, 2025, it announced WICZ-TV would be acquired by Webb Collums's Deltavision Media, and that deal was consummated on August 15, 2025. Deltavision, which also acquired Syracuse's Fox affiliate WSYT in the same exit, is the station's current owner.
News: Chasing a Ratings Powerhouse
Since its network switch, WICZ has consistently ranked second in Binghamton news viewership behind CBS outlet WBNG-TV, a long-established ratings powerhouse, though the gap has closed slightly in recent years; the market's ABC station, WIVT, has generally been a minor factor in the local news race. WICZ's flagship broadcast is its nightly prime-time newscast at 10 p.m., the natural flagship hour for a Fox affiliate, and on Memorial Day in 2009 it added a thirty-minute newscast weeknights at 6 p.m. to strengthen its early-evening presence against WBNG. The station benefited, along with WBNG, from an increase in viewership in June 2009 when WIVT consolidated its news operations with Elmira's WETM-TV. On August 19, 2012, WICZ became the first television station in the Binghamton market to upgrade its local news production to high definition, with a new on-air look, updated graphics and a redesigned set — a notable first for a station of its market size.
Studios in Vestal, Transmitter on Ingraham Hill
WICZ-TV's studios stand on Vestal Parkway East, on New York State Route 434 in Vestal, the suburb immediately west of Binghamton that hosts much of the area's commercial development and its university campus. Its transmitter, on Ingraham Hill Road in the town of Binghamton, rises south of the city; the current facility operates with an effective radiated power of 28 kW and a height above average terrain of about 373 metres. The station's FCC facility ID is 62210. The Southern Tier's hilly terrain has always made television reception a local preoccupation — it explains the UHF education campaign of 1957, Fox's weak pre-1996 signals from neighbouring cities, and the continuing importance of cable, satellite and streaming carriage alongside WICZ's own broadcast signal in delivering Fox 40 to homes across the valley communities of the Susquehanna River.
Digital Transition and Subchannels
WICZ-TV shut down its analogue signal on UHF channel 40 on April 16, 2009, earlier than the national June deadline. Its digital signal remained on its pre-transition VHF channel 8, using virtual channel 40, and in the later spectrum repack the digital channel changed to VHF 7 in 2020. Its present multiplex carries three services: 40.1 carries Fox in high definition, 40.2 carries My 8, its independent service with MyNetworkTV programming, presented in high definition, and 40.3 carries Ion Television. That structure gives a single small-market station a network prime-time service, a second entertainment channel rooted in the old WBPN-LP operation, and a national general-entertainment network — a breadth of choice that would have been impossible in the single-channel analogue era in which the station spent its first fifty years.
Programming and Southern Tier Identity
Fox network programming defines WICZ-TV's prime time: entertainment series, live sports and national events, complemented by syndicated programmes during the day, local news at 6 and 10 p.m., and the MyNetworkTV lineup on My 8. The station's website, wicz.com, presents its news, weather and community coverage for Binghamton and the surrounding Southern Tier towns in New York and nearby Pennsylvania. As the market's Fox affiliate since 1996, and before that its NBC affiliate for nearly 39 years, channel 40 has carried at least one major network's programmes continuously since 1957, making it one of the region's longest-serving media institutions — older, in its WINR-TV origins, than the ABC station it once supplemented and a contemporary of the market's CBS powerhouse it still competes with nightly.
WICZ-TV Today
Today WICZ-TV operates under Deltavision Media from Vestal as Fox 40, with its transmitter on the Ingraham Hill site Stainless built in 1971 and its call letters still carrying Henry Guzewicz's name. Its journey — Gannett newspaper ownership, a tower manufacturer's station, a headline-making decision to leave NBC for a rising Fox, two decades under Northwest Broadcasting's Stainless name, then Cox, Imagicomm and Deltavision in quick succession — mirrors the consolidation of American local television, while its product has stayed recognisably local: Binghamton news, Southern Tier weather and Fox prime time on channel 40. For viewers across the valley, that continuity, rather than any single owner, is what Fox 40 means.
