XETV-TDT


XETV-TDT is a television station located in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, broadcasting programs from Canal 5 and NU9VE. Its terrestrial signal also covers the San Diego area across the Mexico–United States border. The station is owned by Grupo Televisa, and its technical operations and transmitter facilities are located at Mount San Antonio in Tijuana.
From its initial sign-on in 1953 until 2017, XETV broadcast English-language programming and operated business offices, and later a studio and newsroom, in San Diego. The station's American operations were managed by Bay City Television, a California-based corporation owned by Televisa. It was most recently an affiliate of The CW. XETV ceased its San Diego operations on May 31, 2017; The CW moved its San Diego affiliation from XETV's main channel to a subchannel of KFMB-TV the following day; XETV's cable channel 6 was transitioned to KFMB-DT2 on the same date.

History

Early years (1952–1953)

Tijuana was the first city outside of Mexico City to receive a television license. A license to broadcast on channel 6 was granted to Jorge I. Rivera for XEAC-TV. Broadcasts were initially scheduled to start in November 1952, becoming the second cross-border television station, after XELD-TV.
XETV came into existence because of a technical quirk affecting stations in San Diego and Los Angeles. Even after the Federal Communications Commission's Sixth Report and Order lifted a four-year-long freeze on awarding television construction permits in 1952, signing on a third television station in the San Diego market proved difficult. While San Diego and Los Angeles are not close enough that one city's stations can be seen clearly over the air in the other, the unique geography of Southern California results in tropospheric propagation. This phenomenon makes co-channel interference a significant enough problem that the two cities must share the VHF band.
By 1952, San Diego and Los Angeles already had all but three channels on the VHF band covered. Channel 3 initially had been deemed unusable as a signal because KEYT-TV in Santa Barbara would travel in a straight line across the Pacific Ocean. San Diego's first two television stations, KFMB-TV and KFSD-TV, which were respectively affiliated with CBS and NBC, were among the last construction permits issued before the FCC's freeze on new television station licenses went into effect. The UHF band, introduced by the FCC after the freeze, was not seen as a viable option; television set makers were not required to include UHF tuners until 1964 as a result of the passage of the All-Channel Receiver Act. Additionally, several portions of San Diego County are very mountainous, and UHF signals do not carry very well across rugged terrain.
Complicating matters, the Mexican authorities had allocated two VHF channels to neighboring Tijuana – channels 6 and 12. Since these were the last two VHF channels left in the area, the FCC did not accept any new construction permits from San Diego as a courtesy to Mexican authorities. One of the frequencies, channel 6, had originally been assigned to San Diego before the freeze; it was reassigned to Mexico as a result of the Sixth Report and Order.
Although San Diego was large enough to support three television stations, it soon became obvious that the only way to get a third VHF station on the air would be to use one of Tijuana's allocations. The Azcárraga family, owners of Telesistema Mexicano, quickly snapped up the concession for channel 6, and signed XETV on the air on April 29, 1953. It is the San Diego area's second-oldest television station after KFMB-TV, which began operations on May 16, 1949.
At its launch, XETV was an independent station, broadcasting programs in both English and Spanish from its studio facilities in Tijuana. Channel 6 also established a business office on Park Boulevard in the University Heights section of San Diego, which handled sales accounts from north of the border. The Azcárragas chose to focus XETV toward San Diego and its English-speaking audience because there were more households in that side of the market that had television sets at the time than there were in Tijuana, which did not get its own all-Spanish station until 1960 when the Azcárragas signed on sister station XEWT-TV. Owing to its initial bilingual, bi-national audience, XETV billed itself as "The International Station" during its early years.

Joining ABC (1953–1973)

Section 325 of the Communications Act of 1934, sometimes known as the Brinkley Act, prohibits any transmissions by any means to a foreign station that can be received in the United States without approval from the FCC. This provision closes a potential loophole to circumvent the Communications Act and other regulations of broadcast stations.
In January 1953, former ABC programming executive Alvin George Flanagan, who had become general manager of XETV, applied for a Section 325 permit to supply 30 percent of XETV's programming via microwave relay from San Diego. This permit was granted soon afterwards. Both this permit and further requests from NBC and DuMont to transmit their programming to XETV were then opposed by TBC Television, Inc. and KFSD radio, the applicants for San Diego's remaining channel 10 allocation. By late 1953, the FCC had failed to take further action on the matter, but it was rendered partially moot as KFSD-TV took the NBC affiliation when it signed on that September. XETV was finally granted special temporary authority to carry live coverage of an air show from Naval Air Station Miramar on November 22, which station management hoped was a good omen; two previous requests to carry one-off coverage of special events that year were denied. However, Flanagan moved on to manage KCOP-TV in Los Angeles in January 1954, and the request for a full-time Section 325 permit was dismissed for good on April 26.
ABC, in the meantime, was still relegated to part-time clearances on KFMB-TV and KFSD-TV. It intended to add XETV as an affiliate and applied for its own Section 325 permit to relay its programming, which was approved in November 1955. Pending the outcome of an appeal by KFMB-TV and KFSD-TV, ABC signed a stopgap affiliation deal with XETV which allowed it to carry network programming via a method known in the television industry as "bicycling". Programs were received at the station's San Diego offices, recorded on physical media and then physically transported over the border to the transmitter. This delivery method does not require FCC permission. The deal became effective April 5, 1956.
The original decision was stayed by the United States Court of Appeals due to the decision having been made in the absence of hearings by the FCC; after hearings were held, the FCC upheld the grant in October 1956. KFMB-TV again appealed the grant and the Appeals Court remanded the decision to the FCC. The Commission again upheld the grant on April 22, 1958; in November of that year, KFMB-TV again asked for revocation, based on an ad in Broadcasting which XETV identified itself as a San Diego station. In 1959, KFMB-TV once again complained about educational programming that it alleged was being transmitted to XETV from California Western University without a permit; the FCC explained that while the university had an expired permit to transmit the programs directly, it found the programs were being bicycled and took no action. ABC was required to apply for its Section 325 permit annually, with the FCC reserving the right to determine whether the continued affiliation was in the public interest.
XETV also received criticism from its American-based competitors for censoring programming that might have been seen as objectionable in Mexico. A regulatory lawyer representing KCST told The New York Times that XETV dropped network news coverage of drug trafficking across the border. The station also refused clearance of a 1969 episode of Marcus Welby, M.D., "Don't Ignore the Miracles", as it depicted an abortion in a Mexican border town at a time when abortion in Mexico was still illegal.

Transition

In 1968, as it had every year since 1956, the FCC renewed its permit allowing ABC to transmit its programming to XETV. Only this time, Western Telecasters, which owned the fledgling independent UHF station KCST at the time, contested it and began a lengthy battle to take San Diego's ABC affiliation from XETV. KCST claimed that it was no longer appropriate for a Mexican-licensed station to be affiliated with an American television network when there now was a viable American station available, and also asserted that XETV had lacked local programming that effectively served the San Diego audience. In May 1972, the FCC, siding with KCST, revoked ABC's permit to transmit its programming to XETV. The commission concluded that the primary factor in the 1956 decision – that allowing XETV to carry ABC served the public interest since there were no other available U.S.-based television stations – no longer applied with KCST being "ready, willing and desirous" to affiliate with the network. The commission could not go as far as to force ABC to affiliate with KCST, but acknowledged that the network was unlikely to dislodge the existing affiliations of KFMB-TV or KFSD-TV. XETV and ABC then went to the U.S. Court of Appeals, who upheld the FCC ruling; the station later sought relief at the U.S. Supreme Court, and was also denied.
XETV surrendered the ABC affiliation to KCST in two stages: daytime programming moved to KCST in June 1973, followed by prime time programs and all other shows by July 1, 1973. In spite of seeing ratings gains both nationally and locally, ABC was dissatisfied with having been forced onto a UHF station and stayed with KCST for only four years before moving to KGTV in 1977; KCST subsequently signed up with NBC at that time.
XETV once again became an independent station, with a standard program schedule composed of syndicated offerings, off-network programs, movies, and children's shows. In addition, because Mexican broadcast regulations did not limit commercial time – every Sunday, the station – in a forerunner to future changes in the U.S. – in effect, became the first station in North America to carry an infomercial, which consisted of a one-hour advertisement of listings of local houses for sale. As FCC regulations at that time limited television stations to 18 minutes of commercials in an hour, such a program could not have been run on U.S. television at that time.
In 1976, XETV moved its business operations to an office facility on Ronson Road in the Kearny Mesa neighborhood of San Diego; the station's broadcast operations, meanwhile, remained in Tijuana. Channel 6's Tijuana-based production and technical operations eventually moved from Mexico into an expanded wing of this facility. In the early 1980s, XETV produced a popular comedy program, Disasterpiece Theatre, which parodied campy low-budget horror and science fiction films by making fun of them as they aired, similar to the format of Mystery Science Theater 3000 a decade later.