KSAT-TV

KSAT-TV (channel 12) is a television station in San Antonio, Texas, United States, affiliated with ABC. Owned by Graham Media Group, the station maintains studios on North St. Mary's Street on the northern edge of downtown, and its transmitter is located off US Highway 181 in northwest Wilson County (northeast of Elmendorf).

History

KONO-TV

Channel 12 was the last commercial VHF allocation in San Antonio to be awarded. The first applicant for the allocation came in June 1952, from Bexar County Television Corporation, a subsidiary of Alamo Broadcasting Company, owners of radio station KABC. Bexar County Television planned to operate channel 12 as an ABC Television affiliate, owing to the radio station's affiliation with the ABC radio network. Shortly thereafter, Mission Broadcasting Company, owners of KONO radio (860 AM and 92.9 FM), also applied for a channel 12 license. By 1953, both Bexar County Television and Mission Broadcasting proper had dropped out of the running for channel 12. However, two new applicants filed applications: Sunshine Broadcasting Company, then-owners of KTSA radio, and Mission Telecasting Company. Mission was majority (50%) owned by Eugene J. Roth, principal owner of Mission Broadcasting Company, with the other half of the company split among seven individuals. Sunshine would later withdraw its application, although another player would throw their hat into the ring in January 1954: the Walmac Corporation, owners of KMAC radio. In an attempt to avoid long, drawn-out hearings for a license, Walmac and Mission met in May 1954 to work out an agreement between the two parties. On March 12, 1956, the FCC heard final oral arguments between Walmac and Mission, with an FCC examiner having already favored Mission's application the previous year. In May 1956, the FCC granted a license to Mission and denied Walmac's bid. Mission officials proceeded to construct a new, 16,000-square-foot (1,486 m2) studio building and 574-foot (175 m) tower on North St. Mary's Street, adjacent to the studios for KONO radio.

Originally targeting a sign on date of December 1, 1956, the station would not begin regular testing until the evening of January 14, 1957. Assistant station manager Jack Roth noted that viewers from as far as Corpus Christi, Austin, Kerrville, Boerne, and Camp Wood were all receiving the test pattern. The station finally came on the air for good on January 21, 1957, as KONO-TV, becoming San Antonio's fourth television station and the third to broadcast in English. The station took its call letters from its partially co-owned sister radio stations. Channel 12 has been a full-time ABC affiliate since its debut, more or less by default. The first program broadcast by KONO-TV was the inauguration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower beginning at 10 a.m. that morning. Mission announced on July 31, 1967, that it had sold channel 12 to Providence, Rhode Island–based The Outlet Company for $10.5 million. Eugene Roth, Mission chairman, said that the reason he decided to sell the station was because of the increasing costs needed to keep pace with the rapidly growing television industry.

KSAT-TV Outlet took control of the station in January 1968 and announced that the call letters would be changing to the present KSAT-TV on February 1. The change was necessitated by an FCC regulation at the time in which stations that were not co-owned could not share the same base call sign. Outlet was taken private in 1986 and the company's new owners sold KSAT to H&C Communications. KSAT nearly lost its ABC affiliation to KENS in 1990. In July of that year, management at KENS were in discussions about switching their station to ABC. KENS management cited that the poor performance of CBS programming would jeopardize the station's overall dominance in the San Antonio market. However, after negotiations did not go anywhere, both KENS and KSAT signed new affiliation agreements with CBS and ABC respectively in August. KSAT was nearly sold to Young Broadcasting in 1992, but the sale was canceled due to Young's failure to obtain financing. On April 22, 1994, H&C sold KSAT and Houston sister station KPRC-TV to The Washington Post Company (now Graham Holdings Company), which placed the two stations within its Post-Newsweek Stations subsidiary. In the early 2000s, Post-Newsweek adopted a unified "Local" brand for most of its television stations. KSAT briefly rebranded as "Local 12" in 2004, before reverting to the station's previous branding of "KSAT 12" (the call letters are pronounced syllabically as "K-Sat"). Although the station does not follow this brand standardization, the "Local" wording is periodically visible in the logo bug seen during the station's newscasts, which cycle between both brands (mimicking a similar behavior used by sister stations KPRC-TV and WDIV-TV in Detroit, whose logo bugs cycle between the station's call letters and channel number and their respective on-air brands "Local 2" or "Local 4"). In March 2014, KSAT relocated from its longtime St. Mary's Street studios to a new, state-of-the-art two-story facility that was built in an area that was formerly part of the station's parking lot. The building houses a large newsroom, numerous offices and meeting spaces, a convenience store-style breakroom for staff and a courtyard with outdoor seating as well as a grill and garden area. Demolition began on the former KSAT studio building shortly after the station relocated; by May 2014, that space would be transformed into a new parking lot for station employees and news vehicles.

Programming

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