KVOS-TV


KVOS-TV is a television station licensed to Bellingham, Washington, United States, serving the Seattle–Tacoma market as an affiliate of the Spanish-language network Univision. It is owned by Weigel Broadcasting alongside Seattle-licensed MeTV owned-and-operated station KFFV, channel 44. Its other subchannels carry Weigel's other diginet concepts. Though it now functions as a Seattle-market station, for much of its history it primarily served an audience in southwestern British Columbia, Canada, including Vancouver and Victoria.
KVOS-TV's transmitter is situated atop Mount Constitution on Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands, at an altitude of above the adjacent terrain. The station's signal is very well received throughout the British Columbia Lower Mainland, southern Vancouver Island, and much of northwest Washington. KVOS-TV's original studios were located on Ellis Street in Bellingham. However, with the sale of KVOS-TV to OTA Broadcasting in 2010, the Bellingham facility was closed and the station currently shares studios with KFFV on Third Avenue South in Seattle. KVOS-TV at one time maintained offices in Burnaby, British Columbia, and before that on West 7th Avenue in Vancouver, but no longer has a physical presence in the Vancouver area.

History

Early years

KVOS signed on June 3, 1953; owned by Bellingham businessman Rogan Jones along with KVOS radio. Jones had owned the radio station since 1928, and was best known for being the focus of a case that established broadcasters' right to the same news reports as newspapers. Its first broadcast was a kinescope of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, which took place the previous day. Since Canada had no television stations operating west of Ontario at that point, the British government flew film of the BBC's coverage to Vancouver, where the Mounties escorted it to the border. The Washington State Patrol then drove the film to Bellingham. The station's original slogan was "Your Peace Arch Station, serving Northwest Washington and British Columbia."
KVOS initially experienced financial trouble, despite Jones thinking that he could successfully support a television station in a city the size of Bellingham. He built a powerful transmitter on Orcas Island in hopes of reaching Seattle, but even with increased power, it did not cover enough of the Seattle area to solve the problem. For a time, the revenues from his radio station were all that kept channel 12 afloat. In 1955, Jones, realizing that most of his audience was across the border, incorporated KVOS in Canada, establishing a subsidiary company in Vancouver. The subsidiary, KVOS-TV Limited, brought in revenue for the station by allowing many Vancouver-area businesses to buy advertising time on the station. KVOS-TV continued to broadcast from Bellingham, with much of its audience based in southwestern British Columbia.
After just nine years of owning KVOS-TV, in 1962 Jones sold the station to Miami-based Wometco Enterprises.
Prior to the advent of Canadian content regulations in the early 1970s, Canadian television stations typically spent so little money on domestic television production that KVOS's Vancouver production office was actually one of the largest Canadian production studios anywhere in the entire country, investing most prominently in television documentaries through its Canawest Film Studios division and employing more Canadian writers, actors, artists and musicians than any other media organization in Canada besides the CBC, according to Vancouver MP Simma Holt.
The station was further damaged by a 1976 change in Canadian tax law, by which Canadian companies could no longer write off advertising purchased on American television stations as a tax deduction. In its efforts to stop the change, the station had proposed that it be granted an exemption on the condition that it then return $2 million per year back to Canadian television production; its proposal did not succeed, but the station survived the hit by closing its Canadian production office and reducing its advertising rates to offset the tax increase that its advertisers would have to pay. Even into the 1990s, the station was still sometimes criticized in CRTC licensing hearings pertaining to the Vancouver television market for purportedly draining advertising revenue from the Vancouver stations; CKVU-TV president Daryl Duke once even went so far as to compare KVOS to smallpox.
Dave Mintz, who had been a minority investor in the station since 1955 and president of the station since 1961, left the station in 1979 to become president of Canada's fledgling Global Television Network. Although American by birth, due to the importance of the Vancouver operations to the station, Mintz was residing full-time in Vancouver by the time he took the Global job.

Network affiliations, 1955–1980

KVOS began as an affiliate of DuMont upon sign-on in 1953 and remained so until DuMont went off the air in 1956. From January 1, 1955, until about 1979, KVOS was a primary CBS affiliate. In the late 1970s, KVOS sharply reduced its carriage of CBS programming to resolve two commercial disputes. First, Seattle's CBS affiliate, KIRO-TV, had launched complaints against the station and CBS regarding duplicate transmission of CBS programming in the Seattle media market. Second, Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission regulations seeking to increase Canadian content and reduce the number of American network affiliates retransmitted on cable television systems in Canada put pressure on the station.

Conversion to independent and secondary Citytv affiliation

While KVOS nominally retained its CBS affiliation up to 1987, carrying a few CBS programs such as 60 Minutes, it transitioned into an independent station which primarily carried a diverse mix of syndicated and locally produced programming, including locally produced news and public affairs programs. Beginning in 1990, the station also carried a number of programs syndicated from the Toronto-based independent station Citytv, whose owner CHUM Limited did not yet have an outlet in nearby Vancouver.
Wometco was bought by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in 1984. KKR sold off the Wometco group in 1985, with KVOS sold to Ackerley Communications. In the early 1990s, due to Federal Communications Commission syndicated exclusivity rules affecting the Seattle media market, KVOS was dropped from most Seattle cable television systems. For part of this era, the station used both Canadian and American TV ratings at the start of each program, and was believed to be the only station on either side of the border to do so. Since at least early 2007, with the station's realignment toward a U.S. audience, only U.S. ratings have been shown.

Second stint as an independent station

In 2001, CHUM Limited purchased the Vancouver station CKVU-TV from Canwest and launched a new station in Victoria known as CIVI-TV. The launch of the new outlets, along with a major series of affiliation and ownership changes in the Vancouver–Victoria market in September 2001, caused KVOS to be displaced by CIVI from its long-time home on channel 12 on many Vancouver-area cable systems, as well as losing Citytv as a source of programming.
The station came under the ownership of Clear Channel Communications in 2003, following that company's purchase of Ackerley. On November 16, 2006, Clear Channel announced that it would be selling its entire television division, including KVOS-TV, after being bought by private equity firms. On April 20, 2007, Clear Channel entered into an agreement to sell its entire television stations group to Providence Equity Partners' Newport Television. Providence Equity initially announced that it would not keep KVOS or KFTY in Santa Rosa, California; instead, those stations were to be resold to LK Station Group. However, LK could not obtain financing, so KVOS remained with Newport.
In 2008, KVOS filed an application to the FCC to build its digital facility in Granite Falls in Snohomish County. The proposed location would have provided city-grade coverage of most of the Seattle area while remaining within of Bellingham, as required by FCC rules. However, it would have significantly diminished its reach into Canada. Presently, KVOS provides grade B coverage of Seattle's northern suburbs, but just misses Seattle itself. This application was dismissed on July 16, 2009.
In January 2010, KVOS swapped channel positions with TSN on Shaw Cable in Metro Vancouver. In Vancouver, KVOS is not included on Shaw's "basic" line-up, but is included as channel 30 on Shaw's "classic" and "digital" line-ups. In Victoria, KVOS is included only on Shaw's "digital" line-up, on channel 69.
In October 2010, KVOS was added to Comcast's digital lineup on channel 72 in the Seattle–Tacoma area. This is the first time in 20 years that the station has been able to be seen in Seattle proper. This also marks the first time KVOS has been viewed in parts of Southwest Washington and Gray's Harbor coastal communities of Aberdeen and Hoquiam.

MeTV affiliation and added subchannels

The station became an affiliate of the classic television network MeTV on April 25, 2011. Later, TheCoolTV was added as a subchannel of KVOS on August 18, 2011. Unlike the main 12.1 feed, the 12.2 feed was not carried on any Canadian cable system. In January 2014, TheCoolTV was dropped in favor of Movies!.
Newport agreed to sell KVOS to OTA Broadcasting, LLC, a company controlled by Michael Dell's MSD Capital, in December 2011. The deal created a duopoly in the Seattle market with KFFV. OTA Broadcasting assumed control of KVOS on March 6, 2012. As a result of this sale, most of KVOS' staff was laid off, and most of the operations staff were moved to Seattle.
In September 2013, subchannel 12.3 was added, airing Canadian Punjabi language specialty channel Sur Sagar TV. The latter was dropped in mid-2015, and the feed went dark until September 5, 2016, when it started broadcasting Heroes & Icons.
On March 12, 2015, the main feed of KVOS had adopted to KFFV's 44.6 feed, the branding itself had been switched from MeTV KVOS to MeTV Seattle while the ident was MeTV KVOS-KFFV. Advertising was also shared between KVOS and KFFV. Due to WeatherNation TV previously airing on KFFV, Comcast identified the station as KFFVVW on its on-screen guide.