KBVO
KBVO is a television station licensed to Llano, Texas, United States, serving the Austin area as an independent station with a secondary affiliation with MyNetworkTV. It is owned by Nexstar Media Group alongside NBC affiliate KXAN-TV ; Nexstar also provides certain services to KNVA, a de facto owned-and-operated station of The CW, under a local marketing agreement with Vaughan Media. The three stations share studios on West Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and San Gabriel Street ; KBVO's transmitter is located near the intersection of TX 71 and Llano County Road 307 in unincorporated Llano County.
KBVO-CD in Austin operates as a low-power, Class A ATSC 3.0 lighthouse of KXAN-TV, KNVA, and KEYE-TV; this station's transmitter is located at the West Austin Antenna Farm on Mount Larson.
History
As a semi-satellite of KXAN
On November 5, 1985, the Llano Broadcasting Co. filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission for a license and construction permit to operate a commercial television station on UHF channel 14. On July 10, 1986, the Mousunds received approval to assign KLNO for use as the television station's call letters.Image:Kxam-logo.png|165px|thumb|left|KXAM-TV logo used from 1991 to 2007; it was based on the logo used at the time by KXAN-TV.
Although KXAN-TV increased its transmitting power in 1973, the station found it difficult to adequately compete against CBS affiliate KTBC-TV, ABC affiliate KVUE and, later, KBVO-TV largely because of the difficulties that UHF television stations experienced with signal propagation in areas of rugged terrain. The station's analog signal on UHF channel 36 provided an inadequate over-the-air signal to the western part of the Hill Country and was marginal to basically unviewable in Llano, Fredericksburg, Blanco and surrounding areas, with some parts of the region only being able to receive a clear signal from channel 36 once cable television became established in the Austin market in the late 1970s.
To solve this coverage gap problem, in 1989, KXAN rolled out plans to launch a network of UHF repeater stations to serve areas that had fair to no reception of its main signal, which was to have included five low-power television stations serving Llano, Blanco, San Marcos and Burnet as well as a fill-in translator in Austin. On May 9, 1989, LIN Broadcasting—through an indirect subsidiary, Kingstip Communications Inc., which LIN acquired as part of its 1979 purchase of channel 36—filed an application to acquire the dormant KLNO license from Horseshoe Bay Centex Broadcasting Co. for $100,000; LIN intended to launch KLNO as a semi-satellite of KXAN to reach viewers in the western Hill Country who could not adequately receive the channel 36 signal. On December 6, 1990, the FCC granted LIN/Kingstip's application to acquire the construction permit for KLNO, conditioned upon the payment to Horseshoe Centex Broadcasting not exceeding $100,000.
Channel 14 first signed on the air as a KXAN semi-satellite on September 6, 1991; it was the first full-power television station ever built and signed-on by the LIN TV Corporation. While the station was intended to improve KXAN's over-the-air reception in eleven Central Texas counties, some viewers in this part of the Hill Country initially complained that the KLNO signal created interference issues with other Austin-area television stations. In an Austin American-Statesman report on these issues published three weeks after KLNO's sign-on, KXAN chief engineer Dave Daniel cited that signal amplifiers installed onto the home antennas of many Hill Country residents to enhance reception of other Austin-area stations had the side effect of strengthening the Channel 14 signal to levels that interfered with those stations; to remedy this problem, the KXAN engineering staff developed amplifier filters to be distributed to affected area residents.
After only one month on the air, in order to match its parent station, LIN changed the Llano station's call letters to KXAM-TV on October 14, 1991. The station simulcast KXAN-TV's programming for most of the broadcast day, with the exception of breakaways for local news inserts produced from a bureau facility in Llano that were placed into channel 36's newscasts. KLNO/KXAM's existence was primarily acknowledged only in KXAN's legal station identifications, with a variant of channel 36's logo being utilized for disambiguation purposes in channel 14's own station IDs and periodically during KXAN's newscasts until February 2007. Along with other improvements to the station's news operations, the expanded signal coverage provided by Channel 14 helped boost KXAN's profile in the market, helping it vie for first place with KVUE in the late 1990s.
On January 14, 2002, KBVO-CA converted into a Spanish language station, when it became a charter affiliate of TeleFutura ; in January 2009, that station converted into a full-time simulcast of primary CW/secondary MyNetworkTV-affiliated sister station KNVA, after Univision Communications acquired the local affiliation rights to TeleFutura and migrated its programming to Class-A low-power station KTFO-CA, which the company had previously operated as a repeater of Univision owned-and-operated station KAKW-TV.
As a separate entertainment-based station; MyNetworkTV affiliation
On August 3, 2009, Channel 14's call letters were changed to KBVO, named after the University of Texas at Austin's mascot, "Bevo". Subsequently, on October 21, KBVO took over as the Austin-area affiliate of MyNetworkTV, assuming the programming rights from KNVA, which had carried it on a tape delayed basis since the network-turned-programming service launched in September 2006. Until fellow charter MyNetworkTV affiliate WKTC in Columbia, South Carolina, added a primary affiliation with The CW in August 2014, KNVA was one of two American television stations that carried programming from both The CW and MyNetworkTV.KBVO—which originally branded as "MyAustinTV" under the service's branding conventions, before identifying solely by its call letters in 2012—also adopted a separate program schedule, with a partial emphasis on professional, high school and college sports events. LIN and KXAN management cited the conversion into a separate station as an effort to provide unique program offerings to differentiate KBVO amid a decrease in the number of Hill Country households that received KXAN over-the-air since Channel 14 signed on. Rather than offering a market-wide simulcast feed on a subchannel of either KXAN or KNVA, the full-power KBVO converted low-power station KBVO-CA into a translator to extend its reach into metropolitan Austin; however, its 75-watt signal barely covered Austin proper and did not cover surrounding towns such as San Marcos and Georgetown. As such, most viewers living in Austin and surrounding areas originally had to relay on cable or satellite in order to receive the station.
On March 21, 2014, Richmond, Virginia-based Media General announced that it would purchase the LIN Media stations, including KXAN-TV, KBVO, and the LMA with KNVA, in a $1.6 billion merger. Despite the fact that KBVO no longer acted as a simulcast of KXAN, Media General filed to renew an existing satellite relay waiver to allow KBVO to continue under the same ownership as KXAN to comply with FCC rules in effect at the time that prohibited legal duopolies in media markets where there were fewer than eight independent owners of full-power television stations. The FCC approved the merger on December 12, 2014, with the deal being consummated on December 19.
On March 9, 2015, the KBVO-CD translator—which concurrently moved from UHF channel 51 to UHF 31—increased its effective radiated power to the maximum 15kW, which allowed it to cover the entirety of the Austin metropolitan area. Furthermore, on September 23, 2016, the main KBVO signal increased its ERP from 75 watts to 15,000 watts, which expanded the station's signal contour to a radius that includes San Marcos and Georgetown, among other Central Texas cities.
On January 27, 2016, after terminating the planned $2.4-billion acquisition of the Des Moines, Iowa–based Meredith Corporation it announced the previous September, Media General announced it had signed an agreement to sell its assets to the Irving-based Nexstar Broadcasting Group—which had a previous $14.50-per-share offer for the group be rejected by Media General two months earlier—for an evaluation of $4.6 billion in cash and stock plus the assumption of $2.3 billion in Media General-held debt. The transaction was approved by the FCC on January 11, 2017; the sale was completed six days later on January 17, at which point the existing Nexstar stations and the former Media General outlets that were not subject to divestiture to address ownership conflicts in certain overlapping markets became part of the renamed Nexstar Media Group. The deal marked Nexstar's re-entry into the Austin market, as the group had previously operated KEYE-TV under a local marketing agreement with Four Points Media Group from 2009 to 2011, concluding after Sinclair Broadcast Group acquired KEYE and the other Four Points stations; it also resulted in KBVO becoming the fourth Nexstar station to have originated as a part- or full-time satellite station prior to converting into an independently programmed outlet.
Programming
KBVO carries the entire nighttime-exclusive MyNetworkTV programming schedule; however, the station may timeshift the MyNetworkTV schedule to late evening and/or overnight timeslots to accommodate local or regional sporting events and fulfill advertising commitments for commercials sold for carriage during local ad breaks within the service's prime time lineup. In addition, KBVO may take on the responsibility of running NBC network programs in the event that sister station KXAN-TV is unable to carry them because of extended breaking news or severe weather coverage.KBVO also serves as an alternate local carrier of the Xploration Station educational program block, offering certain programs preempted by Fox owned-and-operated station KTBC due to Fox Sports programming commitments on Sunday mornings in lieu of those programs being tape-delayed to air in an open timeslot within that station's weekend daytime schedule. From the station's conversion into a MyNetworkTV affiliate in 2009 until September 2014, KBVO aired a night-behind rebroadcast of sister station KXAN's 10 p.m. newscast on Tuesday through Saturday mornings.