Like other network stations serving Burlington and Plattsburgh, WVNY has a large audience in southern Quebec, Canada.

This includes Montreal, a city that is 10 times more populous than the station's entire U.S. viewing area, as well as the Montérégie region.

WEZF-TV was the host station for the 1980 Winter Olympics and the famous "Miracle on Ice" hockey game between the United States and Soviet Union.

From its inception until the late 1990s, channel 22 competed against fellow ABC affiliate WMTW-TV in Portland, Maine; WMTW's analog transmitter on Mount Washington covered most of Vermont.

WMTW had been the ABC affiliate of record for the market until WVNY-TV signed on, and continued to be offered on many of the area's cable systems well into the 1980s.

From 1985 until 1996, WVNY dropped ABC's General Hospital in favor of cartoons; the soap opera could still be seen in the area via CFCF-TV in Montreal, which has long been carried on Champlain Valley cable systems.

In April 1983, amid declining ratings against Sale of the Century on WPTZ, the soap opera was dropped by WVNY.

From 1987 to 1990, the station aired Canadian Football League games as part of the league's broadcast syndication service, the Canadian Football Network (CFN); the CFN was backed by the Global Television Network, then a loose-knit television system, which lacked an affiliate in Montreal at the time (it would eventually gain a Quebec station in 1997).

for the same purpose (at first only the last half-hour of the show but later the whole hour) and the Sunday edition of Good Morning America from 2004 to 2005, as well as its first incarnation of the program from 1993 to 1999.

A retransmission dispute forced Time Warner Cable systems to replace WVNY with future sister station WUTR from Utica, New York, on December 16, 2010.

Concurrently, Smith Media sold WFFF-TV to Nexstar Broadcasting Group, which operates all of Mission's stations through shared services agreements.

In addition, WVNY and WFFF also became sisters with fellow ABC and Fox affiliates WTEN and WXXA-TV, respectively, in Albany, New York.

After WVNY moved into WFFF-TV's studios in 2005, Smith Media made an announcement that the company was planning to establish a joint news department for the two stations.

On March 3, 2008, WFFF added a weeknight and Saturday broadcast at 7 on WVNY known as Fox 44 Local News on ABC.

The Saturday edition eventually moved to 6:30 which has been the case on Sundays from the start in order to accommodate ABC programming.

It has had difficulty achieving equivalent coverage with its digital signal compared to analog channel 22 raising concerns some parts of Vermont would be left without a full-power ABC affiliate.

The translator had a transmitter southeast of the town's Severance section and did not have an application to air a digital signal; its license has since been canceled.