WFUT-DT (channel 68) is a television station licensed to Newark, New Jersey, United States, serving as the UniMás outlet for the New York City area.

The stations share studios on Frank W. Burr Boulevard in Teaneck, New Jersey, and transmitter facilities at the Empire State Building in Midtown Manhattan.

Channel 68 was originally awarded to Walter Reade in 1970 as part of what had initially been an attempt to revive WRTV, a dead UHF station of the mid-1950s broadcasting from Asbury Park.

The station was notable as the first broadcast outlet for The Uncle Floyd Show, a local children's program that gained a cult following in the New York metropolitan area.

After conglomerate Wometco Enterprises reached a deal to become channel 68's majority owner, on March 1, 1977, WBTB-TV became the first station in the U.S. at that time to broadcast subscription television programming to paying users.

As subscriptions declined due to rising cable penetration, Wometco sold off the WHT business but kept channels 68 and 67, which began broadcasting a music video service known as U68 on June 1, 1985.

In August 1966, two groups applied for channel 68 in Newark, New Jersey, which they hoped to telecast from the Empire State Building in New York City.

One application came from Clifton S. Green, a businessman from Brooklyn, while the other came from Atlantic Video Corporation, owned by the Walter Reade Sterling chain of movie theaters.

Blonder-Tongue's ambition for channel 68 was to use it as the first station to test its recently approved BTVision subscription television (STV) technology, which would beam otherwise scrambled pictures into the homes of paying subscribers with decoders.

[11] Isaac Blonder, a Blonder-Tongue executive, cited the potential for STV to acquire the rights to first-run movies and entertainment programs previously unavailable over conventional, ad-supported television,[12] and he believed his service would eventually have as many as 500,000 subscribers in the New York metropolitan area.

[13] Blonder-Tongue obtained FCC approval to acquire channel 68 in August,[13] leaving it the task to build the station, which was given new WBTB-TV call letters.

[28] In April 1976, Wometco Enterprises, a Florida-based media conglomerate that owned television stations in Florida, North Carolina, and Washington state, as well as movie theaters and cable systems in New Jersey and elsewhere, agreed to buy 80 percent of WBTB in exchange for paying $1.5 million of its debts.

As 1977 turned to 1978, Wometco launched a promotional push for its service; that year, the station built a translator on channel 60 atop the World Trade Center, rebroadcasting its signal in New York City,[39] and it added 800 subscribers a week.

Ken Taishoff, who took over as general manager in 1979, noted that children were more likely to turn to a UHF station than their parents; this strategy gave WTVG its first rating point in the late afternoons when it aired the shows.

[3][47] Long Island's only commercial TV station, WSNL-TV (channel 67), returned to the air in December 1979 after a silence lasting more than four years.

[51] Wometco closed on the purchase in January 1981,[53] and in June, it bought out CanWest's interest in the joint venture and became the sole owner of WSNL while sharing ownership of WWHT with Blonder-Tongue.

[54] Earlier that year, the largest possible competitive threat to Wometco Home Theater, a proposed ON TV system on WNJU-TV (channel 47), dissipated when the owner, Chartwell Communications, opted against competing with WHT.

[57] This year was the peak for subscription operation as the early 1980s recession deepened and cable systems continued building out in areas served by STV.

[58] In addition, beginning in 1981, Wometco Home Theater was also seen on WRBV-TV (channel 65) in southern New Jersey and the Philadelphia area,[59] where it had as many as 20,000 subscribers before closing in November 1984.

[60] WWHT and WSNL began broadcasting WHT programming 20 hours a day on March 1, 1983, and discontinued all ad-supported telecasting, including FNN and Uncle Floyd.

[68] After approving several measures in a shareholders meeting designed to prevent a hostile takeover,[68] the Wolfson family and Wometco board sold the company to merchant banker Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) on September 21, 1983, in a $1 billion leveraged buyout,[69] the largest in history at the time.

[75] That company renamed itself Cooper Wireless Cable and began broadcasting from the channel 60 translator, though in doing so it lost subscribers who could not receive the low-power signal from the World Trade Center.

[77] In April 1985, KKR executed another leveraged buyout, this one of Storer Communications, then facing a shareholder revolt[78] and a hostile takeover attempt by Comcast.

[79] The deal was completed in December 1985; however, approval by the FCC was contingent on KKR divesting either Storer's cable systems in northern New Jersey and Connecticut, serving 195,000 subscribers, or WWHT–WSNL within 18 months to satisfy cross-ownership rules.

While Storer and Wometco remained nominally separate companies, the FCC recognized KKR as the primary owner of both and forced it to make a number of station or system divestitures.

[81] U68 touted its format as specifically programmed for the New York market in contrast to the national cable service of MTV; it carved out time to air videos by local acts.

The stations would carry the newly established Home Shopping Network 2 service, which offered a more upscale assortment of products than the existing HSN.

[98] As late as 2000, Diller promised to bring the CityVision general-entertainment independent format that USA Broadcasting was slowly rolling out in its portfolio to New York and Los Angeles.

USA Station Group Partnership of New Jersey, the licensee of WHSE, registered a trademark on WORX as a future call sign in October 2000.

[99] After discussions for a joint venture with ABC fell apart, the USA Broadcasting stations were sold to Univision for $1.1 billion in a deal announced in December 2000.