The station signed-on January 1, 1988 with the call sign W11BS licensed to Little Falls. It was a low-powered translator and general entertainmentIndependentoutlet. The station joined UPN as a charter affiliate on January 16, 1995. On December 22 of that year, W11BS upgraded to low-powered status and adopted the WUPN-LP calls. However, less than a year later, the station became WPNY-LP after a full-powered outlet in Greensboro, North Carolina took the call letters. At some point in time, WPNY became a sister outlet to WFXV and began to be housed at the latter's facility on Greenfield Road in Rome. In 1996, both stations were sold to Sullivan Broadcasting which would itself be bought out by the Sinclair Broadcast Group only two years later. Instead of being acquired by that company, WPNY and WFXV were purchased by Quorum Broadcasting founded by former Sullivan head Dan Sullivan. The stations were acquired by current owner Nexstar in 2003. It was announced in December of that year that Clear Channel Communications would sell WUTR to Nexstar subsidiary Mission Broadcasting. The sale was approved by the Federal Communications Commission on April 1, 2004 at which point Nexstar took over operations of WUTR under local marketing and joint sales agreements through the company's operational arrangement with Mission. Although the ABC affiliate was the subordinate entity, WPNY and WFXV were consolidated into WUTR's Deerfield studios. In 2006, The WB and UPN merged into one network called The CW Television Network. Several weeks later, Fox announced the establishment of another network called MyNetworkTV, for the benefit of those UPN or WB affiliates that did not earn a CW affiliation. Since "WBU", the cable-only WB affiliate operated byNBC affiliate WKTV through The WB 100+, was the default choice to take the CW affiliation, WPNY-LP chose to associate with MyNetworkTV, and promptly did so on September 5, 2006.
After WUTR's sale to Mission Broadcasting, speculation began circulating that Nexstar would establish a combined news department for WUTR, WFXV and WPNY in order to take on longtime dominant WKTV. Progress was not made until March 31, 2011 when the company announced it would launch a news operation for the three stations by mid-September. Nexstar invested $1 million for new equipment and the hiring of twelve employees. Eyewitness News at 6, seen weeknights at 6:00 p.m. on WUTR, was repeated at 7:00 p.m. on WPNY from September 2011 to September 2017. It was the only offering of local news in its time slot, since there was no broadcast seen on WKTV. After this rebroadcast was quietly canceled, there was no local news programming airing on WPNY.
