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WCFE basic facts

• Channel: 57 Plattsburgh, N.Y.
• Network Service: PBS
• Known as: Mountain Lake PBS
• Owner: Mountain Lake Public Telecommunications Council, Inc.
• Web sites: mountainlake.org, pbs.org
• Schedule: wcfe.titantv.com
• Transmitter: 44° 41' 43" N 73° 53' 0" W

1982 WCFE logo. Actually this is the first logo from channel 57 that I actually remember watching. Courtesy: Daren Gleason

Brief history

In March 1977, from donated basement offices and a studio at Plattsburgh State University, WCFE Channel 57 sent out its first broadcast. The station was originally to be called WNNE (the NNE was for Northeast New York Educational Television Association, its corporate name), but changed its call letters to WCFE to represent the Clinton, Franklin and Essex counties of New York.

In 1993, the station changed its corporate name to Mountain Lake Public Telecommunications Council, Inc. and its on air name was also modified from WCFE to Mountain Lake PBS to represent its growing viewership, outside New York State, in Quebec, Ontario and Vermont.

The Videotron PBS switch of 1989

Unlike most Champlain Valley network affiliates, WCFE was not always available on Montreal cable, similar to how WWBI and WBVT can only be seen over-the-air today. Just when and how the second PBS station was introduced varied for CF Cable and Videotron subscribers, and in the case of the latter, why it was added was quite controversial.

WCFE first came to Videotron, not out of the kindness of the cable company’s heart but rather out of a desire to save money by replacing WETK (PBS) Burlington with WCFE (PBS) Plattsburgh. The move angered many viewers who felt that the Vermont station provided superior programming, and back then it arguably did.

“The Commission (CRTC) notes that several interventions expressed dissatisfaction with Vidéotron's replacement, in December 1989, of WETK Burlington, Vermont, a PBS educational television station, with WCFE-TV Plattsburgh, New York, another station from the PBS network. The licensee explained that the change, which provides a better quality signal to subscribers, was made to avoid the payment of royalties for the retransmission of distant signals, as required pursuant to the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement. However, it did acknowledge at the hearing that it had not adequately informed its subscribers in advance of the reasons for the change, and indicated that steps had been taken to prevent a recurrence of the problem.”
--From CRTC decision 90-1036 regarding Videotron’s license renewal.

Needless to say, WETK (known then as Vermont ETV) also wasn’t pleased with Videotron’s decision and they protested by sending a guide to all their Montreal-area members on how to best receive over-the-air UHF signals. A similar version of that guide still exists today on the Vermont Public Television web site.

But eventually WETK would be brought back to the cable line-up and public television viewers lived happily ever after. Well, not exactly, WETK came back as a replacement for TV Ontario (CICO-TV) and again the change was made simply so that Videotron could save money (TV Ontario now wanted royalty payments for each subscriber outside the province). But in this case, the change made much more sense since WETK was the more popular of the two services. TVO was also removed from CF Cable at about the same time and later returned as a Pay TV service to all Montrealers.

Over at CF Cable, the addition of a second PBS station was a lot simpler and less controversial. WCFE (PBS) appeared as a replacement for WMTW (ABC), as approved by the CRTC in August 1990. This change generally made sense because the diversity of programming between the two PBS stations was much greater than that of the two ABC stations (the other being WVNY). Also WCFE had a higher quality signal than that of WMTW, which somehow looked like as if it was being pulled in from Mars. Note that Videotron had also deleted WMTW, about a year earlier.

In the end, WMTW was be the only U.S. service to be removed due to new free trade rules, regarding royalties for the retransmission of distant signals.

But all the channel swapping over at Videotron did lead to some confusion. For a brief period, CF Cable and Videotron were each carrying a PBS station on cable 14, although it wasn’t the same one. Even when the cable companies decided to carry both, they each added the other station on channel 27. As CCTH Webmaster Rodney M. reminded me:

“Looking at a 1993 issue of TV Times, CF carried WETK on ch14 and WCFE on ch27, while Vidéotron carried WCFE on ch14 and WETK on ch27.”

You can just imagine the confusion at the water cooler when a West-Island resident would try and have a conversation with an east-end resident about what he saw on PBS the night before.

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