KSBI
KSBI is a television station in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States, affiliated with MyNetworkTV. It is owned by locally based Griffin Media alongside CBS affiliate KWTV-DT. The two stations share studios on West Main Street in downtown Oklahoma City; KSBI's transmitter is located on the city's northeast side.
History
Locke Supply ownership
The UHF channel 52 allocation was contested between two groups that vied to hold the construction permit to build a new station on the frequency. The first prospective permittee was Satellite Broadcasting Company – a religious nonprofit corporation headed by Donald J. Locke, owner of Oklahoma City-based regional hardware store chain Locke Supply Company, and his wife, Wanda McKenzie Locke – which petitioned the Federal Communications Commission allocate a ninth television frequency in the Oklahoma City market in the spring of 1979. The FCC Broadcast Bureau contended that, even though Edmond had no television channel assignments, Satellite Broadcasting failed to justify that such a need for one in the Oklahoma City suburb existed, but did allow the group to apply for use of the Oklahoma City-assigned allocation with Edmond as a designated city of license under the FCC's "15-mile" rule, which allowed licensees to assign a city of license located from the city to which the proposed station's broadcast assignment was designated. Satellite Broadcasting filed an application with the FCC for a license and construction permit on October 17, 1980, proposing to sign on a religious television station on the frequency. The second applicant, TV 52 Broadcasting, Inc., filed its own application on January 8, 1981.The FCC granted the license to Satellite Broadcasting on April 15, 1982; two months later in August 1982, the group applied to use KSBI as the planned station's callsign. After six years of delays in getting KSBI operational, the station first signed on the air on October 3, 1988. KSBI's original studio facilities were housed out of Locke Supply's corporate offices on 82nd Street and Pole Road in southeast Oklahoma City. For its first 16 years on the air, channel 52 was largely run as a religious independent station; station management settled on the format after initially hedging on their original plans to institute a religious format, which had planned to lease free airtime to churches and televangelists. Atypical of most television stations on the air at that time, KSBI originally broadcast on a part-time basis, airing Monday through Fridays from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. during a six-month test broadcasting stage. Programming expanded to 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. by March 1, 1989.
The station was exclusively available over-the-air in the market until June 1993, when must-carry rules passed by the FCC that allowed broadcast stations to request mandatory carriage on cable providers went into effect. Cox Cable—whose Oklahoma City system, at the time, only served the city proper and select inner-city suburbs—began offering KSBI on channel 40 ; Multimedia Cablevision—which served outer suburbs including Edmond, Midwest City, Moore and Bethany, all of which are now served by Cox—placed KSBI on channel 33 at that time. In preparation for the addition to Cox and Multimedia, channel 52 adopted an 18-hour daily schedule from 6 a.m. to 12 am; the station would begin broadcasting 24 hours a day by 1996. During most of the 1990s and early 2000s, in addition to airing local and nationally syndicated religious programs, KSBI also carried a limited amount of secular sitcoms, Westerns and movies, some of which were cherry-picked from INSP and FamilyNet. Despite its format, KSBI did not accept or solicit financial support via monetary contributions from viewers.
Beginning in the 1990s, KSBI gradually signed on a network of translator stations throughout the state. Eventually, because of this wide relay network, channel 52 claimed to have the largest broadcast coverage area of any commercial television station in Oklahoma; at its peak, its signal was relayed over fourteen translators serving areas within the Oklahoma City market and in markets adjacent to it such as Tulsa, Elk City, Ponca City and Ardmore. It also gained cable coverage in the Tulsa, Wichita, Amarillo, Lawton–Wichita Falls and Ada–Sherman markets. In August 1999, the station upgraded its transmitter from an effective radiated power of 1,355 kW to a total power of three million watts, after installing a new transmitter antenna atop the broadcast tower on 122nd Street and Kelley Avenue in northeast Oklahoma City.
In June 2000, KSBI began including more family-oriented secular programming in themed evening blocks. The inclusion of more secular programs to the schedule was partially cited because of the decline in Southern gospel music programming available on the syndication market. At that time, KSBI placed guidelines for its advertising and program content, prohibiting certain types of advertising, infomercials, telethons or religious programs that solicited donations from viewers.
Sale to Family Broadcasting Group
Following Don Locke's death in February 2000, Locke Supply's board of directors—led by Locke's former wife, Wanda McKenzie, who took over as the company's chief executive officer—were approached by various station owners beginning in April 2001 for offers to acquire KSBI, its regional translator network and low-power sister station KXOC-LP. In the interim, KSBI and its sister properties were involuntarily transferred from Locke's estate to an employee stock ownership plan handled by Locke Supply, which received FCC approval on November 17 of that year. The company ultimately decided to sell off the stations to focus on operating the Locke Supply chain that Don Locke founded more than three decades earlier. On October 8, 2001, Locke Supply agreed to sell KSBI to Christian Media Group, a newly formed locally based company that was founded by former KWTV meteorologist Brady Brus; his sister and local media personality Brenda Bennett; John Benefiel, senior pastor of Church on the Rock; and media executive Jerry Mash.However, Christian Media's agreement to buy the station would fall apart, after the upstart company failed to pay its $15 million bid to purchase KSBI from Locke. The company attempted to accrue the funds to buy the cluster, but were unable to obtain the needed cash, even after it was granted several extensions to come up with the money. Station management subsequently increased the estimated purchase value to $20 million, largely because of the station's then-recent launch of its digital television signal; KSBI was the first in Oklahoma to offer two digital subchannels, including HDNet and a simulcast of its analog feed.
Brus and Bennett would get a second chance to acquire KSBI, KXOC and the former's translator network on July 8, 2003, when Locke sold the stations to Family Broadcasting Group of Oklahoma, Inc., a restructuring of the former Christian Media Group that the siblings co-founded with Brady's wife, certified public accountant and treasurer Angie Brus; and Joe Bowie, co-president/CEO of Retirement Investment Advisors Inc. and Seekfirst Media LLC. The deal included permissory rights for Family Broadcasting to take over the operations of KSBI and KXOC-LP under a time-lease agreement effective July 21, which would continue until the acquisition received regulatory approval by the FCC ; the sale was finalized on March 17, 2004.
After Family Broadcasting assumed full control of the station, KSBI was repositioned as a family-oriented general entertainment independent with syndicated secular programming that contained minimal to no sexual content, overt violence or strong profanity added to the schedule. Most of the initial secular programs seen on KSBI under Brus' management consisted of sitcoms, drama series and westerns from the 1960s to the early 1990s.
The station also launched a weather department—which it heavily invested in—and aired local weather updates throughout the broadcast day, incorporating interactive touch screen technology for its weather presentation and installing a network of remote cameras throughout various cities across Oklahoma. In February 2004, the station became the first television station in Oklahoma to provide severe weather watches and warnings in both English and Spanish. Channel 52 also eventually added sporting events to its schedule, consisting mainly of basketball and football games from state high school and Southeastern Conference collegiate teams.
While its syndicated inventory was fairly limited early on, KSBI eventually expanded its programming slate; this began in the fall of 2008 with the additions of NurseTV, Lost and American Chopper, followed the next year by the acquisitions of Deadliest Catch, Cold Case Files, The Martha Stewart Show, Judge Hatchett, My Wife and Kids and then the addition of The King of Queens to the schedule in the spring of 2010.
Chesapeake Energy co-founders Aubrey McClendon and Tom L. Ward purchased a portion of Family Broadcasting stock in January 2007; this investment occurred after Family's equity was restructured to retire all long-term debt.
After reaching a deal with the NBA's Oklahoma City Thunder to telecast select regular season games in 2008, KSBI rebranded as "Thunder TV". That year, the station also began construction on a new state-of-the-art studio facility in Yukon; completed in the spring of 2009, KSBI relocated to the new facility by that September. That year, DirecTV began carrying KSBI's programming in the Tulsa area as an out-of-market station.
Family Broadcasting appointed two former KOCO-TV veterans as lead executives on November 1, 2010: Vince Orza and Jerry Hart became KSBI's president/CEO and vice president/operations manager, respectively. Orza and Hart worked together at KOCO during the 1980s. The station also divested some of its translators; six were converted into repeaters of former sister station KXOC-LP, while two others based in Enid and Stillwater continued to rebroadcast KSBI's signal. The station updated its programming mix, shifting from classic series to newer syndicated programs while introducing a slate of new locally produced shows.
KSBI affiliated with MyNetworkTV on September 17, 2012, replacing KAUT-TV, which reverted to independent status.