Another major broadcaster is switching signals from the Empire State Building to One World Trade Center: ION Media, the nation’s largest broadcast station group, with 60 stations reaching 98 million homes.
ION Media will use the facility as its digital broadcast hub for its New York flagship station, Ch. 31.
One World Trade’s owners, the Port Authority and the Durst Organization, said the 1,776-foot-tall tower’s 408-foot-tall mast “provides the tristate area with a perfect, 360-degree signal from a state-of-the-art omni-directional antenna … the ideal high-power UHF frequency footprint for high-definition broadcasting.”
Last year, Durst also lured CBS, NBC and PBS back to the WTC for their primary broadcasting operations — which had used the Twin Towers prior to 9/11.
Terms of the ION Media lease were not disclosed. Broadcast operations that previously left the Empire State Building generated about $6.3 million in lease payments there in 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time.
