KTVI
KTVI is a television station in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, affiliated with the Fox network. It is owned by Nexstar Media Group alongside KPLR-TV, an owned-and-operated station of The CW. The two stations share studios on Ball Drive in Maryland Heights; KTVI's transmitter is located in Sappington, Missouri.
History
As WTVI
The station first signed on the air by Signal Hill Telecasting Corporation on August 10, 1953, as WTVI, broadcasting on UHF channel 54. It was originally licensed to Belleville, Illinois, and was the second television station in the St. Louis market after KSD-TV on February 8, 1947. The station's first broadcast was a baseball game between the St. Louis Browns and Cincinnati Reds, announced by Buddy Blattner, Bill Durney and Milo Hamilton. It operated as a primary CBS affiliate, and held secondary affiliations with ABC and DuMont. DuMont affiliation was agreed to in February 1953 to replace KSD-TV. The station was project to sign on May 15, 1953. The station originally operated from studios located in Alton, Illinois. The CBS affiliation moved to KWK-TV when it debuted on July 8, 1954; more or less by default, WTVI became a primary ABC affiliate.As KTVI
The station moved to UHF channel 36, and relocated its city of license to St. Louis on April 9, 1955, keeping the base "TVI" letters as part of its callsign while flipping the first assigned letter from "W" to "K" with this switch of sides of the Mississippi River, thus changing to the current KTVI. It moved its operations to facilities located in the Clayton-Tamm/Dogtown neighborhood in west St. Louis. However, the Federal Communications Commission had recently changed its regulations so that the station could have kept its license in Belleville even while moving its main studio to St. Louis. The WTVI calls are currently used by a PBS member station in Charlotte, North Carolina.The station lost DuMont programming when the network ceased operations in 1956, making KTVI an exclusive ABC affiliate. As the FCC would not require television sets to include UHF tuners until 1961, on April 15, 1957, KTVI moved to VHF channel 2, something it had attempted to do soon after moving to St. Louis–the channel 2 allocation had been reassigned from Springfield, Illinois, under pressure from the Truman administration, originally done so as not to interfere with CBS-owned WBBM-TV in Chicago.
For many years, the station was owned by the Newhouse newspaper chain, owners of the now-defunct St. Louis Globe-Democrat. In 1980, Newhouse exited from broadcasting, and sold KTVI and its other television outlets to the Los Angeles-based Times Mirror Company. In March 1993, in order for the company to concentrate on its newspaper and cable television system franchises, Times Mirror sold KTVI and its three sister stations—fellow CBS affiliates KTBC in Austin and KDFW-TV in Dallas–Fort Worth and NBC affiliate WVTM-TV in Birmingham—to Argyle Television Holdings in a two-part deal for $335 million in cash and securities. Under the transaction's purchase option structure, WVTM and KTVI were the first two stations that Argyle sold to New World, which the latter purchased for a combined $80 million.. The purchase of the entire group was completed in December of that year following securement of financing for the deal.
As a Fox station
New World Communications ownership
On May 23, 1994, as part of a $500-million overall deal in which network parent News Corporation also purchased a 20% equity interest in the group, New World signed a long-term affiliation agreement with Fox to switch twelve television stations—five that New World had already owned and seven that the company was in the process of acquiring through separate deals with Great American Communications and Argyle Television Holdings, including KTVI—to the network. The stations involved in the agreement—all of which were affiliated with one of the three major broadcast networks —would become Fox affiliates once individual affiliation contracts with each of the stations' existing network partners had expired.. The deal was motivated by the National Football League 's awarding of the rights to the National Football Conference television package to Fox on December 18, 1993, in which the conference's broadcast television rights moved to the network effective with the 1994 NFL season, ending a 38-year relationship with CBS.ABC had a fourteen-month leeway to find a new affiliate in St. Louis, as its contract with KTVI did not expire until July 1, 1995; its affiliation contracts expired only one month after as CBS's agreement with KDFW and KTBC was scheduled to expire, giving the networks that were already affiliated with the three former Argyle stations slated to switch to Fox a longer grace period to find new affiliates than CBS, NBC and/or ABC were given in most of the other markets affected by the Fox-New World deal. Of ABC's options, four prospects were automatically eliminated: KSDK was in the middle of a long-term affiliation agreement between its owner at the time, Multimedia Broadcasting, and NBC; KMOV was under a long-term agreement between CBS and Paramount Stations Group ; and KNLC and WHSL were respectively owned by the locally based New Life Christian Church and the Home Shopping Network at the time, and both stations had inferior signals, even on cable, making either unlikely choices as even last-ditch options. This left independent station KPLR-TV and existing Fox station KDNL-TV as the only viable options with which ABC could reach an affiliation agreement. The network first approached KPLR about negotiating an affiliation deal, ultimately to be turned down by its then-owner Koplar Communications. On August 25, 1994, River City Broadcasting reached an agreement with ABC to shift the network's affiliation rights to KDNL.
KTVI switched to Fox on August 7, 1995, ending its relationship with ABC after 42 years; concurrently, ABC programming moved to KDNL-TV. The last ABC program to air on KTVI was an ABC Sunday Night Movie presentation of Survive the Savage Sea at 8 p.m. Central Time on August 6. As with most of the other New World-owned stations affected by the agreement with Fox, KTVI retained its longtime "Channel 2" branding upon the affiliation switch, with references to the Fox logo and name limited in most on-air imaging; it also retained the news branding it had been using before it joined the network—in its case, The 2 News Team, which the station adopted in November 1990 as an ABC affiliate. In addition to expanding its local news programming at the time it joined Fox, the station replaced ABC daytime and late-night programs that migrated to KDNL with an expanded slate of syndicated talk shows as well as some documentary-based reality series and off-network sitcoms, and also acquired some syndicated film packages and first-run and off-network syndicated drama series for broadcast in weekend afternoon timeslots on weeks when Fox did not provide sports programming.
News Corporation/Fox ownership
On July 17, 1996, News Corporation announced that it would acquire New World in an all-stock transaction worth $2.48 billion, with the latter company's ten Fox affiliates being folded into the former's Fox Television Stations subsidiary, making them all owned-and-operated stations of the network ; upon the completion of the merger on January 22, 1997, KTVI became the first network-owned station in the St. Louis market since CBS sold KMOX-TV to Viacom in 1986. Under Fox ownership, programming began to change very slightly as KTVI began to add stronger first-run syndicated shows as well as stronger off-network sitcoms to the programming mix.KTVI first launched its website on November 1, 1999, which featured a design similar to other sites belonging to Fox's owned-and-operated stations at the time and focused on promotional and programming content initially, but eventually incorporated news content. The website was migrated to the MyFox platform on September 14, 2006. On October 15, 2007, KTVI launched STLMoms.com, a website aimed at St. Louis area mothers, whose concept spun off from a popular blog featured on the station's main website. Subsequently, on June 2, 2008, KTVI launched GarageSaleSTL.com, a free website that primarily features a Google-based map of viewer-submitted garage sales.
Local TV and Tribune ownership
On December 22, 2007, Fox sold KTVI and seven other owned-and-operated stations—WDAF-TV in Kansas City, WBRC in Birmingham, WGHP in Greensboro–Winston-Salem–High Point, WJW in Cleveland, WITI in Milwaukee, KDVR in Denver and KSTU in Salt Lake City—to Local TV for $1.1 billion; the sale was finalized on July 14, 2008. On February 1, 2012, WJW redesigned its web site under the new WordPress-hosted design implemented months earlier by sister stations WDAF and WITI, replacing the site design previously used for the Local TV stations that was developed by Tribune Interactive. On July 1, 2013, the Tribune Company acquired the Local TV stations for $2.75 billion; the sale was completed on December 27.On September 17, 2008, Local TV LLC entered into a local marketing agreement with Tribune Broadcasting, under which it assumed some operational responsibilities for CW affiliate KPLR-TV. The agreement, which took effect on October 1, allowed KTVI to provide advertising and promotional services as well as news operations for KPLR, while Tribune would retain responsibilities over channel 11's programming, master control and production services. The LMA resulted from the formation of a "broadcast management company" that was created to provide management services to stations owned by both Tribune and Local TV. Although it was the senior partner in the agreement, KTVI vacated its longtime studios in the Clayton-Tamm/Dogtown neighborhood on St. Louis' west side and moved its operations to KPLR's facility in Maryland Heights.
On July 1, 2013, Tribune acquired KTVI and Local TV's eighteen other television stations outright for $2.75 billion; 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. As FCC rules prohibit the common ownership of two of the four highest-rated television stations in the same market, Tribune's direct purchase of KTVI to form a duopoly with KPLR was permissible because KPLR ranked in fifth place in total day ratings at the time of the purchase. ; St. Louis also has only nine full-power television stations, seven of which are commercial outlets, making this the only legal duopoly allowable in the market under FCC rules.