KDFI
KDFI, branded as More 27, is a television station licensed to Dallas, Texas, United States, serving as the MyNetworkTV outlet for the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. It is owned and operated by Fox Television Stations alongside KDFW. The two stations share studios on North Griffin Street in downtown Dallas; KDFI's transmitter is located in Cedar Hill, Texas.
Channel 27 began broadcasting in January 1981 as KTWS-TV. It was built by Liberty STV, a subsidiary of Oregon-based Liberty Television, and was primarily created to serve as a conduit for over-the-air subscription television programming. It was the third such station to sign on within four months in the Metroplex. The station's subscription programs originally came from Preview, a division of American Television & Communications. The Dallas–Fort Worth market was home to intense competition in subscription TV, as three different companies operated over a period lasting nearly two years. The market experienced a shake-out that began in September 1982, when VEU, a competing service owned by Golden West Broadcasters, acquired Preview's Metroplex operations. VEU then moved its programming from KNBN to KTWS-TV. By the end of April 1983, VEU was the last subscription system standing.
Liberty Television was purchased by Tele-Communications Inc., a major owner of cable systems, in 1983. TCI determined that it could not keep Liberty's television stations, including KTWS-TV, because of rules that barred cross-ownership of broadcast stations and cable systems in the same areas. It sold KTWS-TV to a consortium known as Dallas Media Investors. With VEU continuing to lose subscribers, the station changed its call letters to KDFI-TV in August 1984 and became a full-time commercial independent on October 1 of that year. The station ran on a lean basis, avoiding the more expensive program purchases that characterized its competitors, but held its own against stations like KTXA and KDAF in the ratings. Dallas Media Investors reorganized in bankruptcy in the early 1990s to settle a lawsuit with Paramount Pictures and a dispute among stockholders. In 1994, Argyle Television, then-owner of KDFW-TV, took over KDFI-TV's programming under a local marketing agreement; KDFW and KDFI became co-owned under Fox in 1999 when the Federal Communications Commission permitted duopolies.
In the years following KDFW's takeover of KDFI, channel 27 increased its profile with higher-quality entertainment programming and rights to telecast various DFW-area sports teams, most notably the Texas Rangers and Dallas Stars. These teams moved their limited over-the-air schedules off KDFI at the end of the 2000s.
History
Channel 27 was assigned to Dallas in 1965 to help resolve competing applications that had been filed for channel 29. That year, Maxwell Electronics Corporation applied for a new television station on channel 29 in Dallas, which placed it into comparative hearing with two other applicants: Overmyer Communications and Grandview Broadcasting Company. Grandview dropped out, and in January 1967, Maxwell amended its application to specify channel 33 instead of 29. The proposed change in channels was part of a plan by Overmyer to give both applicants stations by moving the channel 27 allocation from Tyler, Texas, thus replacing 29 with 27 and 33. This plan, which also eliminated a short-spacing issue, was accepted by the Federal Communications Commission on December 15, 1966.Overmyer Communications dropped out in November 1967 amid an investigation into the businesses of its owner, Daniel H. Overmyer. The next month, Gordon McLendon, owner of KLIF and KNUS, obtained the construction permit. However, by 1969, McLendon had abandoned the plans, and the construction permit had been canceled.
KTWS-TV: The subscription years
On November 15, 1973, Liberty STV applied for a construction permit for channel 27. Liberty STV was a subsidiary of Liberty Television, which owned cable TV systems as well as television stations in Oregon. Also seeking the channel was United Television Broadcasting Corporation, a related company to United Cable. United, though, withdrew its application in 1976.The FCC granted Liberty's construction permit application on February 11, 1980. The permit grant came in the middle of revived activity around three previously dormant ultra high frequency TV channels in the Metroplex, all seeking hybrid stations airing partly commercial and partly subscription television programming. The new station would share a tower with the other two: KTXA and KNBN. Liberty Television set up shop on Regal Row in Dallas and signed a deal with Preview, a division of American Television and Communications, to provide STV service to paying subscribers on evenings as well as weekend afternoons. It announced a lineup of syndicated game shows, movies, children's shows, and classic reruns for its commercial broadcast schedule. By this time, Liberty Television also owned four TV stations in Wisconsin, with which KTWS-TV was placed in Liberty's corporate structure.
KTWS-TV made its first broadcast on January 26, 1981, initially with just Preview programming. Preview charged subscribers a $50 installation fee and $20 a month for continued service, programming sports and feature films; its management believed it would take three to five years for cable, a major competitor to STV, to arrive in the city of Dallas. Later that year, the station hired Bob Gooding, an 18-year veteran of WFAA-TV, to anchor news briefs.
All three stations contributed to an intense STV marketplace; KTXA aired ON TV, KTWS-TV aired Preview, and KNBN aired VEU, which was owned by Golden West Broadcasters. Anthony Cassara, the market manager for VEU, called the Metroplex STV competition "total insanity" in an interview with Broadcasting published in August 1982 and said the market only could support one profitable system. In adopting aggressive discounting, the services accumulated many non-paying subscribers, with VEU's disconnect rate running as high as 8% a month. The first step in consolidation took place on September 1, 1982, when VEU announced it would acquire Preview's customer base and move its programming from KNBN to KTWS-TV by year's end. Preview subscribers began receiving VEU programming on September 12. In the deal, VEU acquired Preview's decoder boxes and added Preview's 25,000 local subscribers to its 42,000. With the consolidation would come an expansion of weekend STV programming, rising to 18 hours a day on Saturdays and Sundays. ON TV remained out of the fray; it was the only one of the three services showing growth in subscribers. One observer told Jerry Coffey of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that one reason VEU succeeded where Preview flagged was a stronger lineup of late-night adult movies. Liberty was a more accepting station of adult STV programming than KNBN, which once vetoed a showing of the movie Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens; Ed Bark of The Dallas Morning News called KTWS-TV "a compliant caretaker station". It cost Golden West $1.5 million to convert the existing VEU subscribers to receive channel 27 instead of 33; further, Golden West had shuttered its only other STV operation, on KAUT-TV in Oklahoma City, and began shipping its decoder boxes south to Dallas.
Meanwhile, the station continued to experiment with its commercial lineup. The station aired two Saturday morning shows produced by kids, Kids' View and Kids' Zone; the former was anchored by a 13-year-old. In January 1983, the station began airing the syndicated Financial News Network in daytime hours. By September 1983, the Star-Telegram was calling the station's daytime lineup "peculiar".
In April 1983, IASTV, an affiliate of the Independent American Group, acquired VEU from Golden West Broadcasters. The move marked the end of the company's foray into subscription television. On April 30, ON TV bowed out of the market, leaving VEU alone; one reason was that KTXA's owner, Milton Grant, had been unwilling to give more time to the service, and the station began objecting to the airing of adult movies in the conservative Metroplex market.
Meanwhile, in February 1983, Liberty Television was purchased by cable system operator Tele-Communications Inc. for $182 million. The television stations would have been TCI's first. However, TCI ran into issues with overlap between cable systems and television holdings, then barred by the FCC. When it closed on the transaction in September 1983, it spun off the Liberty TV station in Eugene, Oregon, and placed the Texas and Wisconsin stations into a trust to be sold within a year.
KDFI-TV: The Dallas Media Investors years
By that time, Liberty had reached an agreement in principle with Dallas Media Investors Corporation to acquire the station. Dallas Media Investors was led by James R. Grant, a financial consultant, and funded by Warburg Pincus Capital Partners. The group planned to honor the existing contract with VEU, which ran until either 1994 or 1996, while restructuring the station's ad-supported programming. The station sold for $15 million. Dallas Media Investors then lured John McKay, the general manager of local CBS affiliate KDFW-TV, to become general manager of KTWS-TV and partner in the corporation. VEU petitioned the FCC to deny the sale to Dallas Media Investors, but the commission approved of the transaction on June 22, 1984, and the new owners took control five days later.On August 16, 1984, KTWS-TV changed its call sign to KDFI-TV. Days later, VEU announced that it would leave the air on September 30, bringing to an end the era of subscription television in Dallas–Fort Worth and making way for a full-time commercial programming schedule on channel 27. McKay hoped advertisers and viewers would take the relaunched station seriously, given its reputation of vanishing at night when it operated in subscription mode. Among the new programs on the channel 27 lineup were Southland Conference, North Texas State University, and University of Texas at Arlington football; a heavy diet of Western movies, with 28 in the first three days; and short local segments hosted by former KDFW-TV personality Jocelyn White. In 1985, the station became the alternate outlet for network programs from NBC that KXAS-TV preempted. It also aired a weekly series of hosted B-movies, The Film Vault, and attempted a weekend magazine-type program featuring White, which only aired for three months.
If Dallas Media Investors had intended to make a quick flip of channel 27, as some analysts believed, this never materialized. The owners put the station on the market for two months in 1985, when analysts believed it could go for twice the price the firm had paid, but opted not to sell. Softness in the regional economy and the advertising market for independent stations, as well as a crowded market, changed the picture. McKay told Michael Weiss of The Dallas Morning News, "he competition is very difficult... The day of buying a property, popping a number and selling are over." Without the backing of a large TV station group, the station worked its way into the independent station conversation in the market with cheaper, sometimes lowbrow programming that sometimes attracted better ratings than its more expensive rivals. In February 1987, KDFI beat KDAF and KXTX-TV in the ratings and tied KTXA; the station also improved its finances.
However, what little operating profit KDFI-TV generated was dwarfed by interest payments on its debt. In 1991, Paramount Pictures sued KDFI-TV over failing to pay for reruns of Mork & Mindy, which McKay believed was connected to its acquisition later that year of KTXA. Paramount won in court; the station then filed for bankruptcy reorganization in order to be fairer to other creditors. The proceeding was dominated by disputes between secured creditors, primarily Warburg Pincus, and the dozens of unsecured creditors; when the creditors resolved their differences in July 1993, they ended an effort by businessman Carl Westcott to buy the station. Channel 27's lineup was highlighted by syndicated talk shows; the station branded itself The Talk of Texas and aired The Jerry Springer Show, The Sally Jessy Raphael Show, and Geraldo in prime time.