KSMO-TV (channel 62) is an independent television station in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, which has a secondary affiliation with MyNetworkTV. It is owned by Gray Media alongside CBS affiliate KCTV (channel 5). The two stations share studios on Shawnee Mission Parkway in Fairway, Kansas; KSMO-TV's transmitter is located in Independence, Missouri. Channel 62 in Kansas City began broadcasting as KEKR-TV in 1983, changing its call letters to KZKC in 1985. Originally owned by Media Central of Chattanooga, Tennessee, it suffered for most of its first decade on air from a management style more suited to stations in smaller markets, inferior programming, and a poor reputation. In 1988, the station was fined for airing an indecent film in prime time, attracting national attention. Financial issues also strapped KZKC, particularly after Media Central entered bankruptcy reorganization in 1987. KZKC was sold out of bankruptcy to First American National Bank of Nashville, Tennessee, in early 1990; the bank quickly sold the station to ABRY Communications. ABRY instituted a top-to-bottom overhaul of programming and facilities, changing the call letters to KSMO-TV in April 1991. The relaunched channel 62 cemented itself as the primary sports and children's station in Kansas City; from 1990 to 1995, viewership tripled and advertising revenue quadrupled. ABRY affiliated the station with UPN upon its January 1995 debut. The station also was the broadcast home of Kansas City Royals baseball for four years, further increasing its visibility. Sinclair Broadcast Group exercised an option to buy KSMO-TV in December 1995. The station dropped UPN in January 1998 after a corporate dispute between Sinclair and the network; two months later, the station became the new Kansas City affiliate of The WB. With the company focusing on duopolies elsewhere and unable to buy a second station in Kansas City, Sinclair sold KSMO-TV to the Meredith Corporation, then-owner of KCTV, in 2005 after Meredith assumed operating control the year before. The station affiliated with MyNetworkTV upon the merger of UPN and The WB into The CW in 2006, and it also added newscasts from KCTV and other local programming to its lineup. Gray acquired Meredith in 2021, the same year that the station converted to ATSC 3.0 (NextGen TV) broadcasting.
History
KEKR-TV: Construction and launch Several applications had been made for channel 62 in Kansas City in the late 1960s, including by Dick Bailey and TVue Associates, but interest around the channel allocation started in earnest at the end of the 1970s, as several business ventures around the country analyzed using unused UHF channels in major cities to broadcast subscription television (STV) programming. In 1977, Buford Television of Tyler, Texas, and SelecTV of Kansas City, Inc., both made applications to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) seeking to establish channel 62 in Kansas City and use it to broadcast STV to paying subscribers, even though Kansas City had an area-wide cable system.
After reaching a settlement with Buford that gave it the right to buy stock in SelecTV of Kansas City, that company was granted the construction permit on April 8, 1981, but channel 62 continued to sit unbuilt for more than two years. The permittee changed its name from SelecTV of Kansas City to Choice Channel of Kansas City in 1982, a year in which Kansas City and its metropolitan area were wired for cable at an accelerated pace and the national economic picture for STV began to sour. Choice Channel of Kansas City then took on a new majority investor: Media Central Inc. of Chattanooga, Tennessee, which purchased a 60 percent interest in the station in February 1983. With Media Central on board, consideration of STV service was dropped and an agreement reached to co-locate its transmitting facility with public television station KCPT. Media Central used modular construction methods: studio equipment was assembled in Chattanooga before being shipped to Kansas City for installation once the studio facility was completed. However, its construction methods ultimately resulted in subpar equipment and poorer reception; at one time, the station volunteered to send repairmen to homes experiencing difficulty tuning it in. In a January 1988 article in Channels magazine, a former station employee was quoted as saying that the high school in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, had better equipment than channel 62, though Media Central's corporate office in Chattanooga did have high-quality equipment. KEKR-TV—whose call letters represented an attorney who helped file for the license—debuted on December 7, 1983, from studios in Blue Summit. It was the first new station in Kansas City since KYFC-TV, a Christian television station, began in 1978, and it was the first new general-entertainment independent since KSHB-TV went on the air as KBMA-TV in 1970. Programming consisted primarily of classic reruns, as well as a handful of first-run and new shows in the Kansas City area and Big Eight Conference college basketball. The station, however, was far from an immediate success. In its first year on air, it attracted just three percent of the Kansas City viewing audience, well below the six to eight percent its founding program director had set as a goal. The station's lone bright spot was that it was drawing young people to watch cartoons in mornings and afternoons. A new general manager, Steve Friedheim, was appointed in a management shakeup; when he attempted to gather public feedback, he found that nobody had heard of his station. Three of his colleagues at his former employer, independent station WNOL-TV in New Orleans, followed him to Kansas City amid turmoil at the New Orleans station.
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