KTBO-TV
KTBO-TV is a religious television station in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States, owned and operated by the Trinity Broadcasting Network. The station's transmitter is located near the John Kilpatrick Turnpike/Interstate 44, on Oklahoma City's northeast side.
History
The channel 14 allocation in Oklahoma City was first assigned to KLPR-TV, which operated from May 31, 1966, to December 1967, as an independent station.KTBO-TV first signed on the air on March 6, 1981, broadcasting from the former studios of KOCO-TV on Northwest 63rd Street. Channel 14 was the first station that was built from the ground up and signed-on by TBN, and also the fourth overall station in the network. The current channel 14 operates under a different license and has never claimed KLPR-TV as part of its history. The station's opening was marked with a live broadcast of TBN's flagship program Praise the Lord, with network co-founders Paul and Jan Crouch throwing a ceremonial switch to mark the beginning of TBN's operations in Oklahoma.
In September 1989, KTBO engaged in a campaign encouraging viewers to call local cable providers Cox Communications and Multimedia Cablevision and tell them to protest premium cable channel Cinemax's broadcast of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, which had garnered controversy among the religious community a year before for its depiction of Jesus Christ in an alternate reality after being tempted by what he later discovers to be Satan in the form of a beautiful child. Although Multimedia responded by blacking out all of Cinemax's broadcasts of the film, Cox refused to preempt the broadcasts and briefly dropped KTBO from its lineup.
On October 27, 2020, KTBO's transmission tower, as well as a radio transmitter owned and operated by TBN, collapsed due to significant freezing rain accumulation created by a severe early-season ice storm that crippled much of Central Oklahoma; ice accumulations on the tower contributing to the collapse were observed to be around. TBN filed a special temporary authority request on November 5, asking to be allowed to remain dark for 180 days while it seeks a temporary transmitter facility from which it can resume broadcasts until the Hefner Road tower is rebuilt. In January 2021, KTBO resumed over-the-air transmission of its TBN programming under a temporary leasing agreement with The Edge Spectrum, Inc., relayed in standard definition over the second digital subchannel of KUOT-CD. KTBO resumed over-the-air broadcasts via its new transmission tower on September 18, 2021.