| Blue Ridge PBS is the Public Broadcasting Service member station for western Virginia. It serves the Roanoke-Lynchburg and Tri-Cities markets from studios in Roanoke. The primary station, WBRA-TV in Roanoke signed on for the first time on August 1, 1967, originally affiliated with the National Educational Television, before that organization was replaced by PBS in 1970. Over the years, WBRA established two satellite transmitters — WSBN-TV in Norton was activated in 1971 and WMSY-TV in Marion began operations in 1981. WSBN brought a city-grade PBS signal to the Tri-Cities for the first time; it's carried on the Tri-Cities DirecTV and Dish Network feeds. In the 1980s, WBRA began identifying on-air as Blue Ridge Public Television, due of its location near the Blue Ridge Mountains. On February 19, 2007, it changed its on-air name to Blue Ridge PBS, though WBRA-TV remains the official call sign. In March 2013, Blue Ridge PBS announced that it would close both WSBN and WMSY by June 30, 2013, leaving East Tennessee PBS outlet WETP as the sole source of PBS programming in the Tri-Cities. The move came as a result of budget cuts that followed the elimination of Virginia's funding for public broadcasting stations in 2012. However, station president James Baum told The Roanoke Times that there are no plans to tear down the transmitters, leaving the possibility that WSBN and WMSY could return in the future. |
|
