KHOU
KHOU is a television station in Houston, Texas, United States, affiliated with CBS. It is owned by Tegna Inc. alongside Conroe-licensed Quest station KTBU. The two stations share studios on Westheimer Road near Uptown Houston; KHOU's transmitter is located near Missouri City, in unincorporated northeastern Fort Bend County. Houston is the largest television market where the CBS station is not owned and operated by the network.
History
The station first signed on the air on March 22, 1953, as KGUL-TV. It was founded by Paul Taft of the Taft Broadcasting Co.. Originally licensed to Galveston, it was the second television station to debut in the Houston market, taking the secondary CBS affiliation from KPRC-TV as the network's new primary affiliate, and has stayed aligned with the network ever since. One of the original investors in the station was actor James Stewart, along with a small group of other Galveston investors. The studio was located at 2002 45th Street in Galveston.In 1956, the original owners sold the station to the Indianapolis-based Whitney Corporation, which became a subsidiary of Dun & Bradstreet in 1971. In June 1959, the station changed its callsign to KHOU-TV and had its city of license relocated to Houston. The Federal Communications Commission license listed both the Houston and Galveston service areas for a time. On April 24, 1960, the station moved to its first Houston facilities at 1945 Allen Parkway, along Buffalo Bayou in the Neartown neighborhood west of downtown Houston.
Belo ownership
In 1984, Dun & Bradstreet sold its entire broadcasting division, including KHOU, to the Belo Corporation, who spun off its Beaumont station, KFDM-TV in order to comply with FCC regulations at the time. KFDM provided at least grade B coverage to much of the eastern portion of the Houston market, with portions of Liberty County getting a city-grade signal. In those days, the FCC normally did not allow common ownership of two stations with overlapping signals, and would not even consider a waiver for a city-grade overlap.Known for its ownership of The Dallas Morning News and its flagship TV station in its home city of Dallas, WFAA, Belo began to make significant investments into KHOU, which had become one of CBS' weakest affiliates during the 1980s under the final years of Dun & Bradstreet ownership. With the addition of stronger syndicated programming including the popular game shows Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! and The Oprah Winfrey Show, the revamping of its news department, and the carrying over of both its Dallas flagship's theme music and popular image branding, The Spirit of Texas, KHOU began to challenge KTRK and KPRC in the local ratings, and eventually became one of CBS' strongest affiliates by the 1990s during a very challenging period for the network. In 1998, KHOU became the first television station in the market to begin broadcasting a high definition digital signal.
On June 13, 2013, the Gannett Company announced that it would acquire Belo for $1.5 billion and the assumption of debt, marking the company's entry into the Texas market and ending KHOU's nearly three decades of ownership by Belo. The sale was completed on December 23. Two years later, on June 29, 2015, the Gannett Company split in two, with one side specializing in print media and the other side specializing in broadcast and digital media. KHOU was retained by the latter company, which would be named Tegna.
Hurricane Harvey
Being situated near Buffalo Bayou in an area that had become prone to flooding, KHOU's longtime studios had become vulnerable to damage from major hurricanes and severe weather as the Houston area grew exponentially over the last six decades. On the night of June 8, 2001, the station's studios flooded during Tropical Storm Allison, resulting in damage to much of the station's offices including its newsroom. The damage was so severe that the station had to cease its ongoing coverage of the ensuing flash flood emergency and instead broadcast a West Coast feed of the Late Show with David Letterman, followed by a feed from the station's doppler radar for roughly 90 minutes until the station could resume its breaking news coverage which lasted the entire weekend. During Hurricane Ike, which hit the Texas Gulf Coast in mid-September 2008, KHOU's storm coverage was distributed nationwide via DirecTV and XM Satellite Radio, as well as through a live feed on the station's website.On August 21, 2017, KHOU began covering Hurricane Harvey as the storm was projected to hit the Texas Gulf Coast with extensive rainfall expected in the Greater Houston area. The station began wall-to-wall coverage on August 25, 2017, with extensive coverage of the storm's landfall in Rockport. While initial coverage focused on storm damage and cleanup in parts of KHOU's viewing area, by the following Saturday, August 26, massive and continuous rain bands from the Gulf of Mexico led to catastrophic flooding throughout the metropolitan area, with much of the flooding being unprecedented in many places.
On the early morning of Sunday, August 27, KHOU was forced to evacuate its studios due to rising floodwaters from the nearby Buffalo Bayou. Around 6 a.m., the first floor of the building became inundated with floodwaters, forcing station employees to completely abandon its facility nearly three hours later after a move to a second floor conference room proved to only be a short-term option, though critical equipment was also moved up to the second floor before the flooding became worse. The station's brand-new news set, weather center, newsroom and master control were destroyed by the floodwaters, which rose up to within the building. Additionally, the station's over the air signal, including its CBS and diginet feeds, were knocked off the air as computers and other equipment became submerged by floodwaters, with staff relegated to providing updates on social media.
After KHOU's signal was knocked off the air, sister station WFAA began providing live news coverage for KHOU by live-streaming on both station's websites and social media profiles until the station was able to resume broadcasting on its own. Seven hours of news were anchored by WFAA's David Schechter and Jason Wheeler. KHOU's staff then evacuated to the nearby Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Houston Branch building on higher ground while a new contingency plan was drafted.
With the assistance of PBS member station KUHT and master control from WFAA, KHOU eventually resumed live broadcasting later that night from temporary facilities at the LeRoy and Lucile Melcher Center for Public Broadcasting on the campus of the University of Houston. At various times, WFAA, along with Tegna NBC affiliate KUSA in Denver, provided assistance with weather graphics and master control. Due to technical difficulties, WFAA originated the August 27 edition of the 10 p.m. news that was simulcast in both cities. Eventually a reliable signal was established an hour later from KUHT's studios at the Melcher Center and storm coverage continued. KHOU is the third commercial station in Houston to utilize a part of the UH campus for its facilities, after ill-fated KNUZ-TV from 1953 to 1954 and KTRK-TV from its 1954 launch until its 1961 move to its current studios in the Upper Kirby district.
On the evening of August 31, the station resumed CBS programming with its prime time lineup. For the first month, the station only broadcast its main HD channel while its two subchannels remained shut down. The following week, on September 4, KHOU began to reuse parts of its previous 2011–2016 news set in the temporary studio. On October 4, the subchannels returned as widescreen SD simulcasts of the main channel in preparation for the eventual return of the diginets, which would finally return on October 12. Around the same time, the station's on-air look returned to normal with full news and weather graphics restored and program guide listings on the terrestrial signal. A temporary news set, similar in design to its previous news set destroyed in the Harvey floods with additional brick accents, would eventually be constructed for the station at the Houston Public Media facilities.
Move to Westheimer studios
On November 16, 2017, KHOU officially announced it would not return to the Allen Parkway facility; the building would eventually be sold to an affiliate of Service Corporation International and was eventually demolished the following May. In December 2017, KHOU announced that it would open a secondary street-side studio at the George R. Brown Convention Center along Avenida Houston. The studio opened in the fall of 2018, and is primarily used for its weekday newscasts. This setup is similar to that of Dallas sister station WFAA's Victory Park studio, which opened a decade earlier in January 2007.On March 29, 2018, KHOU announced that it had signed a lease for of space at 5718 Westheimer Road near Uptown Houston. The station occupies three floors of the high-rise in facilities that include two studios, two control rooms, an open collaboration space for all content producing departments, technical operations, sales and executive offices. The station began its operations from its new facility on Sunday, February 17, 2019, during its 10 p.m. newscast.
On January 21, 2020, KHOU would gain a sister station when Tegna acquired KTBU from Spanish Broadcasting System which had been airing its Mega TV service over that station; the sale was completed on March 24 with KTBU moving its operations three days later into KHOU's Westheimer facilities and dropping Mega TV in favor of Tegna's digital multicast network, Quest, which had previously been airing on KHOU's fourth digital subchannel. While KTBU may serve as an alternate CBS affiliate should KHOU need its main signal for long-form breaking news and severe weather coverage, its primary role has been to serve as a UHF rebroadcaster of KHOU's digital signal.