WCNY’s Digital Transition Story

WCNY is so much more than just a television and radio facility! We are a multi-media organization, and an organization that happens to have a history of “firsts”.

We were the first broadcaster in Central New York to provide digital television to the area. We were the first broadcaster to provide real high definition television to Central New York. We were the first broadcaster to take advantage of the multi-casting capabilities of digital television to provide several standard television channels along with our high definition programming.

Speaking of high-definition, WCNY was the first, and is still the only, media outlet in Central New York to provide locally produced high definition television to our viewers.

We have been providing our WCNY-FM (CLASSIC FM) radio programming via our website, www.wcny.org, for about 9 years, and now have listeners, and members, literally from around the world. We are going to implement “video-on-demand” so that viewers can watch what they want to watch (local productions or national PBS programs), when they want to watch it. Through new digital technologies, we have many opportunities to provide new and creative ways for everyone to take advantage of our services, but all of these technologies can be overwhelming for us all to understand.

In these Technology articles, we will help explain some of the new technologies that we, as consumers, see everyday, and that we are using here at WCNY. We are going to discuss digital television, what we need to do when analog television ends, digital radio, high definition television, multi-casting, how to navigate our website, digital cable, video-on-demand, and many other topics. I want to give you a little peek into our operation here too. A little taste of how we operate our stations.