KPLR-TV
KPLR-TV, branded STL 11, is a television station in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, serving as the local outlet for The CW. It is owned and operated by network majority owner Nexstar Media Group alongside Fox affiliate KTVI. The two stations share studios on Ball Drive in Maryland Heights; KPLR's transmitter is located in Sappington, Missouri.
History
As an independent station
The station first signed on the air on April 28, 1959, as the first independent station in Missouri. The station's call letters were derived from the name of its founding owner, St. Louis real estate developer and hotelier Harold Koplar. Despite losing in his quest to build the station from the ground up, events effectively outside his control would allow him to acquire the license for the station in 1958.CBS was originally granted a construction permit by the Federal Communications Commission to build channel 11 in January 1957, prevailing over three other locally based competitors. But eight months later, CBS decided instead to purchase its existing St. Louis affiliate, KWK-TV. As a condition of the channel 4 purchase, the FCC required CBS to relinquish the channel 11 license and construction permit. CBS did so by transferring it to the Koplar group, known as "220 Television, Incorporated", for no financial consideration. Almost immediately, the three-way deal was held up after the St. Louis Amusement Company, one of the original applicants for channel 11, protested to the United States Court of Appeals in January 1958. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately upheld the decision in November 1958, but CBS had already consummated its deal for channel 4 several months earlier, changing the station's call letters to KMOX-TV – which were intended for channel 11 – and operated it for 28 years. Meanwhile, Koplar went to work building channel 11 on his own, no longer in the face of opposition.
KPLR originally operated from studios within the Koplar-owned Chase Park Plaza Hotel, located on Maryland Plaza in St. Louis' Central West End district. Channel 11 would move into a separate facility adjacent to the hotel several years later. Starting in the mid-1960s, Harold's son Edward J. "Ted" Koplar began working behind the scenes at KPLR, producing sports programming and developing the station's first regular local newscast. Ted Koplar became president and chief executive officer of channel 11 in 1979, and gained complete control of the station upon his father's death in 1985.
For most of its existence, KPLR was a traditional independent station featuring cartoons, sitcoms, movies, drama series and locally produced newscasts. The station was also available on many cable systems in Missouri, Illinois and Arkansas as a regional superstation until the late 1980s. Locally, channel 11's first and only competitor came in June 1969, when Evans Broadcasting launched KDNL-TV. The Fox affiliation for the market went to KDNL when that network launched on October 9, 1986. While this was part of a larger affiliation deal with KDNL's then-owner, Cox Broadcasting, most of the markets in KPLR's cable footprint had enough stations by this point to provide a local Fox affiliate. This would have made the prospect of KPLR as a multi-state Fox affiliate unattractive to the Koplars in any event.
On January 17, 1994, the station began airing the Action Pack syndication block; the block's inaugural broadcast, the made-for-TV movie TekWar, earned locally an 11.2 rating/16 share, a 129% increase over that same time period during November 1993.
In the summer of 1994, the station was approached by ABC to negotiate an affiliation agreement with the network to replace KTVI – which had been affiliated with ABC since it signed on as Belleville, Illinois–licensed WTVI on August 10, 1953 – as its St. Louis affiliate. KTVI was among the thirteen "Big Three" network-affiliated television stations already owned or in the process of being acquired by New World Communications that were slated to switch to Fox under a long-term affiliation agreement announced between New World and then-Fox network parent News Corporation on May 23, 1994. Channel 11 station management would later turn the offer down; ABC instead reached an agreement with River City Broadcasting in August 1994 to shift the affiliation to outgoing Fox affiliate KDNL, which swapped network affiliations with KTVI on August 7, 1995.
WB affiliation
Upon that network's launch, on January 11, 1995, KPLR-TV became a charter affiliate of The WB, marking the first time it maintained an affiliation with a broadcast television network. Koplar had reached a deal to affiliate with The WB in November 1993, more than a year before the network's launch. The WB offered prime time programs only on Wednesday evenings during its first half-season of operation, but would gradually evolve into offering a six-night-a-week schedule by September 1999; as such, for its first few years as a WB affiliate, KPLR continued to fill the 7–9 p.m. time slot with feature films and some first-run syndicated programs on nights when the network did not offer programming. During this period, alongside WB prime time programming and eventually animated series from the Kids' WB children's program block, KPLR carried recent and some older off-network sitcoms and drama series, movies on weekends as well as in prime time on weekdays, some first-run syndicated shows, and a blend of animated and live-action children's shows. For many years, even after joining The WB, KPLR was branded on-air as "St. Louis 11", often using a logo with the "O" in "St. Louis" converted into its "circle 11" numeric logo. At one point, KPLR almost picked up Fox Kids since KTVI declined to carry it, but Fox Kids was turned down by channel 11 station management because the owner felt that "they had a strong slate of children's programming and no room for the Rangers", and KNLC, a religious independent station in the St. Louis market had to pick the affiliation up. Ultimately, by the spring of 1996, due to objections to program content and accompanying national advertising, New Life Evangelistic Center/KNLC owner Rev. Larry Rice began refusing to sell local advertising during the Fox Kids weekday and Saturday blocks ceding local advertising slots to air public service messages from Rice's ministry that discussed various controversial moral issues, and reached an agreement with KTVI to carry Fox Kids starting in September 1996, making it the only New World-owned Fox station to carry the block.On September 26, 1997, Koplar Communications announced it would sell KPLR to ACME Communications for $146 million. Five days later, on October 1, ACME assumed operational responsibilities for the station under a local marketing agreement with Koplar. The sale was finalized on March 1, 1998, ending 38 years of local, family ownership and earning a handsome return on their original investment. It would be ACME's only station on the VHF band during the analog era, as all of the other stations they owned were on UHF. As part of the sale agreement, Ted Koplar signed a three-year contract to remain with KPLR-TV as the station's CEO, along with serving as a consultant to ACME, for an annual salary of $1 million. However, Koplar resigned from KPLR/ACME in October 1999 after one year, citing an irreconcilable rift with ACME management.
In September 1998, KPLR changed its branding to "WB11". In 2000, KPLR began carrying UPN programming in off-hours, running select prime time shows and cartoons from the network's children's program block, Disney's One Too. UPN programs had previously run on KDNL during overnight and weekend timeslots and then on KNLC. St. Louis was one of the few top-50 markets without a UPN affiliate. The station continued carrying UPN in off-hours until July 2002, leaving UPN with no St. Louis affiliate until WRBU carried a secondary affiliation in September of that year; WRBU then became a primary UPN affiliate on April 1, 2003.
On December 30, 2002, Tribune Broadcasting announced it would purchase KPLR-TV and sister station KWBP in Portland, Oregon, from ACME Communications for $275 million; the sale was finalized on March 21, 2003. Also in 2003, KPLR moved its studios from the Chase Park Plaza to a new purpose-built studio facility in Maryland Heights.
CW affiliation
On January 24, 2006, UPN parent company CBS Corporation and WB network parent Time Warner announced that they would dissolve the two networks to create The CW, a joint network venture that initially featured a mix of original first-run series and programs that originated on The WB and UPN. The network signed a ten-year affiliation agreement with Tribune Broadcasting for 16 of the 19 WB affiliates that the company owned at the time, including KPLR.Nearly one month after the CW launch announcement, on February 22, 2006, News Corporation subsidiaries Fox Television Stations and Twentieth Television announced the launch of MyNetworkTV, a network created primarily to serve as a network programming option for UPN and WB stations that were left out of The CW's affiliation deals. Three weeks later, on March 9, WRBU was confirmed to be the St. Louis market's MyNetworkTV affiliate. KPLR-TV remained a WB affiliate until the network ceased operations on September 17, 2006; when the station affiliated with The CW upon that network's debut on September 18, KPLR began branding as "CW 11".
On September 17, 2008, Tribune announced that it would enter KPLR into a local marketing agreement with Fox affiliate KTVI effective October 1, as a result of the formation of a "broadcast management company" that was created to provide management services to stations owned by both Tribune Broadcasting and KTVI owner Local TV. Although KTVI was the senior partner in the deal, it vacated its longtime studios in the Clayton-Tamm/Dogtown neighborhood on St. Louis' west side and moved its operations to KPLR's Maryland Heights facility. The LMA resulted in both stations combining their news departments and sharing certain syndicated programs. On November 1, 2008, the station changed its on-air branding from "CW11" to "KPLR 11" as several Tribune-owned CW affiliates began shifting away from using references to the network within their station branding, and reincorporated the Gateway Arch into its logo.
Tribune bought KTVI outright on July 1, 2013, as part of its $2.75 billion acquisition of Local TV; the sale received FCC approval on December 20, and was completed on December 27, creating the first legal station duopoly in the St. Louis market between KTVI and KPLR. Tribune's direct purchase of KTVI to form a duopoly with KPLR was possible as, in recent years, KPLR and KDNL have rotated between fourth and fifth place in total day viewership due to the weaker viewership of KDNL's programming since its news department was shut down by Sinclair in 2001.
There have long been rumors that ABC has considered moving its affiliation to KPLR, in part because KDNL-TV has been one of the network's weakest affiliates since joining the network in 1995. However, on March 26, 2010, KDNL owner Sinclair Broadcast Group extended its affiliation agreement with ABC to retain the network's affiliation on KDNL and the eight other ABC affiliates that Sinclair owned at the time for five years through August 2015.