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WVIA-TV is the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) member Public television station broadcasting on channel 41 to most of northeastern and central Pennsylvania. It is licensed to Scranton, with studios in Jenkins Township (which shares a post office with Pittston) and transmitter at the northeast Pennsylvania tower farm on Penobscot Knob. ==History== In 1963, several men first met at Coughlin High School in Wilkes-Barre to discuss bringing an Educational television station to northeastern Pennsylvania. Twelve of the men formed the Northeast Pennsylvania Educational Television Association, chaired by Wilkes-Barre superintendent of schools Walter Wood. They received a license for channel 44 a year later. The station's first employee, general manager George Strimel, Jr., was hired in 1965 and given two years to get the station on the air. He was able to do so within nine months, and WVIA-TV signed on for the first time on September 26, 1966. The fledgling station received a considerable assist from the area's commercial stations. WNEP-TV donated the old transmitter and tower facility from WARM-TV (one of the two stations that merged to form WNEP 10 years earlier), while WBRE-TV and WDAU-TV (now WYOU) made their studios available for local productions. All production work was done from the transmitter site. The station grew rapidly, and within a year moved its offices from First Presbyterian Church in Wilkes-Barre to office space donated by King's College, and later to a school in Scranton. In 1969, WVIA moved to a specially-built studio at Marywood College in Scranton. In 1971, WVIA moved to its current studio in Jenkins Township. The station didn't take long to become a part of the community; it won the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's award for community involvement for two straight years in the 1970s. It was the only public television station in Pennsylvania to stay on the air during a 1970 budget crisis. When Hurricane Agnes struck the area in 1972, WVIA preempted its programming to air weather reports around the clock, and lent its equipment to WBRE so it could stay on the air. In 1978, WVIA activated its current tower on Penobscot Knob. It increased the station's coverage by 20%, enabling it to reach 20 counties and giving it a coverage area comparable with most of the area's commercial stations. The station also operates the largest translator network in Pennsylvania. For many years, through cable coverage WVIA was available on cable systems beyond the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre TV market (including Cablevision in Fairfield County, Connecticut and Nassau County, New York). In part, this was due to its unorthodox programming — in the 1980s, it carried on Saturday and Sunday mornings sitcom reruns such as ''Leave it to Beaver'', and ''The Dick Van Dyke Show'' and ''The Honeymooners'' on weekday afternoons, and on Saturday nights ran science-fiction series such as ''Star Trek'' which ran on WVIA from 1984 to 1994, ''The Twilight Zone'', ''The Outer Limits'', plus ''Lost in Space'' on Saturday mornings. Later, the station aired ''The Waltons'' at 4:30 and 5 p.m. and ''All in the Family'' at 6 p.m. from 1989 to 1991. From 1991 until 2009, WVIA aired ''Little House on the Prairie'' from 5 p.m. - 6 p.m. WVIA has always aired a good bit of children's programming during the day, and is one of the few stations that airs ''Sesame Street'' three times a day; 8 a.m., 1 p.m., and as of September 2010, 4 p.m. This is the first time that the show has aired at the 4 p.m. hour since 1989, when it was moved to 3:30-4:30. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「WVIA-TV」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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