KOTV-DT
KOTV-DT is a television station in Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States, affiliated with CBS. It is owned by Griffin Media alongside Muskogee-licensed CW affiliate KQCW-DT and radio stations KOTV, KRQV, KVOO-FM, KXBL and KHTT. All of the outlets share studios at the Griffin Media Center on North Boston Avenue and East Cameron Street in the downtown neighborhood's Tulsa Arts District; KOTV's transmitter is located on South 273rd East Avenue in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.
History
Early history
On March 24, 1948, the Cameron Television Corporation submitted an application to the Federal Communications Commission for a construction permit to build and license to operate a broadcast television station in Tulsa that would transmit on VHF channel 6. The company was owned by George E. Cameron Jr., a Texas-born independent oil producer, broadcasting executive Maria Helen Alvarez and John B. Hill, a salesman for a Tulsa oil field supplier. Both Hill, who would serve as KOTV's original sales manager, and Alvarez owned 15 percent stakes in the company.An employee at KTUL radio, Alvarez conducted a two-year study for station owner John Toole "J. T." Griffin and sister Marjory Griffin Leake into the viability of local television in Tulsa. Alvarez, who had been interested in television since seeing the Dumont studios on a Washington, D.C., business trip, recommended to file for a license application as soon as possible, but Griffin and Leake considered television to still be too risky. In turn, Alvarez resigned from KTUL and sought investors willing to get a station built right away. Through a mutual acquaintance, Alvarez was introduced to Cameron, who was earning $50,000 on a monthly basis and was himself interested in television station ownership. The Cameron-Alvarez-Hill application was unopposed with no other competing applications, allowing the FCC to grant their request on June 2, 1948. A heretofore unnoticed typo in the application assigned the calls KOVB instead of the intended KOTV, for "Oklahoma Television"; this was corrected by the commission in March 1949.
KOTV secured studio space at a former International Harvester dealership in downtown Tulsa in what was, at the time, the largest facility for an American television station. A second floor was added to the facility in the fall of 1954. A transmitter tower was built in the backyard of chief engineer George Jacobs and hoisted to the top of the National Bank of Tulsa Building; Alvarez spent a year convincing National Bank officers that the tower would be safe and, in time, become a local landmark. While the tower was being installed, a workman's wrench fell from atop the building, fatally striking the head of a woman walking underneath the construction site. Detractors took to calling the accident "Cameron's Folly" and used the story to label KOTV as "jinxed"; at a Tulsa Chamber of Commerce luncheon, one radio executive said that anyone investing in KOTV or buying a television set was "foolish".
Cameron Television continued on, with Alvarez handling all aspects of the station's development, while Cameron himself primarily focused on supervising his many oil properties in California. Alvarez and her company co-partners invested nearly $500,000 into developing the station; in an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch shortly before the station signed on, she made the bold statement that KOTV would be operating in the "black" within six months of its sign-on, a comment dismissed by many of its detractors. Alvarez also visited 42 of the 89 existing television stations already in operation throughout the United States to study the intricacies of running a television station.
KOTV first began test transmissions on October 15, 1949; the pattern signal was seen by a handful of viewers among the 3,500 northeastern Oklahoma residents that owned television receivers, carrying as far away as Enid and Eufaula, Oklahoma, Monett, Missouri and Fayetteville, Arkansas. The station started regular broadcasts on October 22, 1949. It was the first television station to sign on in the Tulsa market, the second to sign on in the state of Oklahoma and the 90th to sign on in the United States. More than one month later, on November 23, KOTV broadcast its first locally produced program: a live meeting by the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce at the Tulsa Club, which was attended by many of the station's original critics. One week later, on November 30, the station commenced regular broadcasts at 7 p.m. with a "Special Dedication Program" that featured guests such as Oklahoma governor Roy J. Turner; Tulsa mayor Roy Lundy; singer Patti Page; Leon McAuliffe and his western swing band; and Miss Oklahoma Louise O'Brien. The next day on December 1, KOTV broadcast a two-hour sampling of the top programs from all five networks of the time from which the station carried programming during its first few years. Over 3,000 television sets were placed throughout the city for public viewing, some of them set on sidewalks outside of appliance stores. After several days of this sampling, the public began to buy their own television sets and KOTV began to cement a small, but growing, viewing audience in the Four State Area.
Originally broadcasting for 11½ hours per day from 12:30 p.m. to midnight seven days a week, the station has been a primary CBS television affiliate since it signed on. Channel 6 initially also maintained secondary affiliations with NBC, the DuMont Television Network and the Paramount Television Network at its launch; KOTV would add a fifth affiliation on November 15, when it began carrying a limited selection of ABC network programs. Along with network shows, in its early years, one-third of the station's schedule was devoted to locally produced programs. Even though KOTV's relations with all of the commercial broadcast networks were smooth, the station showed a preference for CBS's program offerings over the others. At first, network programming was aired about one week after their initial live broadcast on the East Coast; it would not be until 1952, before the installation of a microwave link with New York City made reception of live network programming possible. Three hours of programming were filled by varied network content during the evening hours.
On May 12, 1952, Cameron and Hill sold a controlling 85% interest in KOTV to another Texas oil magnate, Jack D. Wrather Jr., and his mother, Maizie Wrather, for $2.5 million. Wrather knew little about television, and persuaded Alvarez – who retained 15% of the station's shares – to stay on as general manager. Wrather also made her a full partner in a new joint venture entity that became known as Wrather-Alvarez Inc.. The sale received FCC approval on July 31. By 1954, the station expanded its daily schedule to 17 hours per day from 7 a.m. to midnight.
Because of the aforementioned freeze on license application grants, KOTV was the only television station in the Tulsa market until 1954. That March, KOTV gained its first competitor when UHF station KCEB signed on as a primary NBC and secondary DuMont affiliate. However, as manufacturers were not required to include UHF tuners on television sets at the time, NBC struck a backdoor agreement with KOTV that allowed channel 6 to continue "cherry-picking" stronger shows from that network. In April 1954, KOTV installed color transmission equipment, in a byproduct of an agreement with NBC to carry network programs produced in the format; the station would air its first network color broadcast, the children's program Ding Dong School, one month later on May 21. A few months later on December 5, KVOO-TV signed on and took the remaining NBC programs that KOTV carried. In preparation of losing NBC programming, KCEB had switched to a primary ABC affiliation in July of that year, with that network agreeing to affiliate with channel 23 on the condition that KOTV be allowed to cherry-pick its shows as well. KTVX took all of the remaining ABC programs when that station debuted on September 18, 1954, which left KOTV with an exclusive CBS affiliation and KCEB saddled with fourth-ranked DuMont. Also in 1954, KOTV constructed a transmitter tower at the Osage–Tulsa county line near Big Heart Mountain, a hill which was named by station president C. Wade Petersmeyer. KOTV management subsequently reached an agreement with the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority to lease space on the tower – which became the fifth tallest structure in the world at the time of its completion that October – for the transmitter of proposed educational station KOED, which would eventually sign on January 12, 1959. The new transmission facility also came with an increase in its transmitter power from 16.5 kW to 100 kW, expanding KOTV's signal coverage to a area. In 1956, KOTV began carrying select programs from the NTA Film Network.
Corinthian Broadcasting and Belo ownership
In April 1954, General Television sold KOTV to Indianapolis-based venture capital firm J. H. Whitney & Company for $4 million. The transaction involved a two-phase transfer in which KOTV was reassigned from General Television directly to Alvarez, Wrather and the latter's mother, Maizie Wrather, all of whom would then transfer their interests to Whitney-owned licensee Osage Broadcasting Corp. The transfer received FCC approval on May 14, with KOTV becoming Whitney's first broadcasting property. Whitney folded the group – which had expanded to include fellow CBS affiliates KGUL-TV in Galveston, Texas, WISH-TV and WISH in Indianapolis, and WANE-TV and WANE radio in Fort Wayne, Indiana – into a new subsidiary, the Corinthian Broadcasting Corporation, on April 26, 1957.In 1958, KOTV became the first television station in Oklahoma to install videotape equipment for the production and broadcast of programming. The following year, in 1959, KOTV upgraded its equipment to broadcast local film shows in color; the later began broadcasting its local programming in color in December 1966. On December 3, 1969, Corinthian Broadcasting – which had its ownership transferred directly to J. H. Whitney from his company's Whitney Communications Corporation unit two years earlier – announced it had reached an agreement to be acquired by private equity firm Dun & Bradstreet for $137 million in stock. Following a 16-month-long regulatory review process that included a deadlocked 3-3 tie vote when the agency first considered the sale's approval in November 1970, the purchase received FCC approval on April 14, 1971, and was finalized the following month on May 27. In 1974, KOTV maintained an affiliation with the TVS Television Network, carrying the network's World Football League game telecasts in place of CBS's Thursday night lineup.
On June 19, 1983, the Dallas, Texas-based A. H. Belo Corporation acquired the six Corinthian Television properties from Dun and Bradstreet for $606 million; KOTV's purchase price was $41 million. The sale – which was considered to be the largest group purchase by a single broadcasting company up to that time, surpassing the price of the Gannett Company's $370-million purchase of Combined Communications Corporation in 1979 – received FCC approval on November 22, 1983, and was finalized in late January 1984. In 1984, KOTV and KJRH formed a consortium to have a new -tall tower constructed between Broken Arrow and Oneta, which was completed in 1985. Additional transmitters were subsequently installed to serve as auxiliary facilities for KOED and religious independent station KWHB.