KBEH
CityGarden Grove, California
Channels
Programming
Affiliations
Ownership
Owner
History
First air date
August 17, 1985; 38 years ago (1985-08-17) (in Oxnard, California; license moved to Garden Grove in 2017)
Former call signs
  • KTIE (1985–1988)
  • KADY-TV (1988–2004)
Former channel number(s)
  • Analog: 63 (UHF, 1985–2009)
  • Digital: 24 (UHF, 2003–2018); 42 (UHF, 2018–2019)
  • English-language Independent (1985–1995, 2002–2004)
  • UPN (1995–2002)
  • Spanish-language independent (2004–2006, 2018)
  • Tr3s (2006–2013)
  • CNN Latino (2013–2014)
Call sign meaning
Named for former owner Bob Behar
Technical information[1]
Licensing authority
FCC
Facility ID56384
ERP35 kW
HAAT894.1 m (2,933 ft)
Transmitter coordinates34°12′47.9″N 118°3′44.3″W / 34.213306°N 118.062306°W / 34.213306; -118.062306
Links
Public license information

KBEH (channel 63) is a television station licensed to Garden Grove, California, United States, serving the Los Angeles area as an affiliate of Canal de la Fe, a Spanish-language religious network. It is owned by Meruelo Broadcasting alongside Spanish independent KWHY-TV (channel 22); the two stations share channel 4 for their broadcasts. KBEH and KWHY share studios on West Pico Boulevard in the Mid-City section of Los Angeles and transmitter facilities atop Mount Wilson.

Channel 63 was originally allocated to Oxnard and began broadcasting in 1985 as KTIE-TV, a local independent station for the Ventura County area. It struggled through its original ownership and was sold to Meshulam Riklis in 1988. KTIE-TV was renamed KADY-TV, after Riklis's daughter, Kady Zadora. General manager John Huddy acquired the station in 1991 but left a financial mess in his wake, leading to a court-appointed receivership in 1996. The station stabilized under its next owner, media broker Brian Cobb.

In 2004, KADY-TV built a booster increasing its Los Angeles coverage and was sold to Bela Broadcasting, which switched it to Spanish-language programming. Since the sale, KBEH has primarily been a Spanish-language station under several owners, with program sources including MTV Tres, the short-lived CNN Latino, and its present programming from the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.

History

A long road to sign-on

The history of channel 63, originally allocated to Oxnard, begins on September 29, 1972,[2] when Lola Goelet Yoakem, a scriptwriter from Malibu, obtained a construction permit for the channel.[3] Aside from the assignment of the call letters KTIE,[4] little of note occurred for the next decade. The permit was assigned to a non-profit organization controlled by Yoakem, Limitless Learning, in 1976;[5] the group did apply for a HEW grant in 1978.[6]

The station was still unbuilt by 1980. That year, the FCC Broadcast Bureau denied Mekaoy Co., which had replaced Limitless Learning as permittee, another time extension to get the station on the air, citing increased interest in UHF television for its crackdown.[7] Two years later, though, the construction permit staged a comeback. After being reinstated on February 22,[8] new technical parameters were authorized,[9] and KTIE was sold to Thorne Donnelley Jr. for $100,000.[10]

Donnelley—grandson of Reuben H. Donnelley, inventor of the yellow pages—brought in new investors, including Beverly Hills accountant and real estate broker Don Sterling (no relation to the former Los Angeles Clippers owner of the same name), and built studios on Maulhardt Road in Oxnard.[11] After a $5 million investment, the station first signed on the air on August 17, 1985, offering movies, syndicated fare and local newscasts to Ventura County from its transmitter on South Mountain near Santa Paula.[12] It was the first television station to operate in Ventura County since KKOG-TV (channel 16) shut down in 1969.[13]

One blow was struck to the station one month before it began broadcasting when must-carry rules requiring local cable systems to add KTIE to their lineups were struck down by a federal court. Though management initially downplayed the impact of this ruling on the station,[14] when the Cox, Century, and Group W cable systems in the market refused to add channel 63, it cut off the station from 30 percent of its planned market.[15] It took nearly ten months for the Group W system, covering the key city of Simi Valley, to finish a channel expansion that included KTIE.[16] The Cox Santa Barbara system did not add the station until August 1987.[17]

KTIE-TV heavily emphasized local programming. The station had a 15-person news department for local news coverage and produced local sports, a call-in show, and public affairs shows.[16] However, the news department was slimmed down by layoffs in late 1986 and early 1987, in response to revenue that came in under forecasts and incomplete cable coverage.[18] Leasing firms sought payment owed to them for equipment the station used for broadcast.[19]

KADY-TV

The original owners, fighting ongoing losses to the tune of $1 million a year, sold the station in 1988 to billionaire Meshulam Riklis, the then-husband of actress Pia Zadora. The acquisition was made through Riklis's PZ Broadcasting.[20] Riklis changed the call letters to KADY-TV in honor of his and Zadora's daughter Kady, in turn the name of the role Zadora played in the movie Butterfly famously financed by Riklis.[21] The station reintroduced itself with its new call letters with a commercial-free weekend; Riklis infused capital to build up the station.[21] The news department was retained, with the news program moving from 7 to 10 p.m.[22] The station also announced plans for live coverage of areas from Santa Barbara to Thousand Oaks.[23]

Riklis and his executives envisioned KADY as a kind of "superstation" for the West Coast and a base for further media expansion.[24] To that end, beginning in 1989, Riklis simulcast KADY on a newly built station, KADE channel 33, at San Luis Obispo.[25][26]

Riklis achieved his wealth by inventing complicated paper schemes like junk bonds and leveraged buyouts. As Riklis's empire began to unravel, KADY-TV was part of settlements, and a payment dispute caused it to lose the San Luis Obispo station where it leased time.[26] The subsequent company, E-II Holdings (a group of jilted Riklis investors),[27] sold KADY to John Huddy, former general manager under Riklis; Huddy had been near a deal in 1991 to acquire the station for $10 million.[28]

Under Huddy ownership, the station returned to local news for the first time since 1989 with the 1993 introduction of Ventura County News Network (VCNN), a separate venture that shared studio space with and aired programming on KADY.[29] VCNN was a joint venture with cable company Jones Intercable.[30] The station also became a charter affiliate of UPN when it launched on January 16, 1995; it built more than 200 miles (320 km) of microwave links to deliver its signal to all cable systems in the Santa Barbara market,[31] adding a translator in Lompoc.[32]

However, Huddy's management became a financial disaster for the television station. Despite promising to offer "the best local news in America",[31] VCNN, unable to perform well due to the way ratings were measured between two media markets in Ventura County and its high costs compared to channel 63's other programs, folded on July 1, 1996.[33] By that time, the station was mired in a string of financial problems. It was behind on rent to Sterling, who had built the station more than a decade prior and still owned the Oxnard facilities, and narrowly avoided eviction in February,[34] only for a court to ratify his right to foreclose on the station a month later for $4 million.[35] Sterling had previously lost a lawsuit for failing to pay monthly rent and a longshot bid at the FCC to have the license transferred back to him.[36] On top of all of this and attempts to sell KADY, Huddy suffered a major heart attack in January 1996.[36]

Fixing the mess

It at least equals the most poorly managed companies I've seen.

John Hyde, on the situation the Huddys left at KADY[31]

The messy Huddy era ended with creditors, primarily program providers, forcing the station into bankruptcy and the naming of a court-appointed trustee, John Hyde, in July 1996.[37] Hyde worked to repair a station in disarray; the state of California had designated KADY a "problem employer" due to a spate of claims made to the state labor commission.[31]

Within a year, a deal had been reached to buy the station, subject to potential outbidding, with Paxson Communications placing an $8 million bid on KADY in July 1997 as part of its national purchasing spree to build Paxnet.[38] At the auction at the end of September, however, a surprise $11 million bid, from media broker Brian Cobb, won out.[39]

Cobb had no immediate plans for what to do with the station.[40] However, he soon cast his gaze south. Cobb began a $4 million facility upgrade[41] by moving the station's studio facilities from Oxnard to Camarillo and filed to boost the station's power to cover Simi Valley and the Conejo Valley better.[42] Another go at local news was made, this time using newscasts produced by Santa Barbara ABC affiliate KEYT-TV, using studio and editing space provided by KADY.[41] The station abruptly disaffiliated from UPN on September 1, 2001.[43]

Going Spanish

On a blue box, a gold serif 6 in the upper left and 3 in the lower right, with K B E H - T V beneath.
Logo used after the Bela acquisition

In 2004, Cobb sold the station for $30 million to Bela, LLC, a Florida-based Spanish-language broadcaster headed by Bob Behar. The move came after KADY was approved to build a booster on Mount Wilson, a major move to gain visibility in the Los Angeles market.[44] In May 2004, the station dropped its prior programming and became KBEH, a Spanish-language independent targeting the Los Angeles market and available on Los Angeles-area cable systems.[45] In 2006, MTV Tr3s launched, with Bela's KBEH and KMOH-TV/KEJR-LP in the Phoenix market switching to the network.[46]

Bela Broadcasting sold KBEH to Hero Broadcasting in January 2008.[47] On January 28, 2013, KBEH began serving as the first station of CNN Latino, a news service targeting U.S. Hispanics focusing on news, lifestyle, documentary, talk and debate program as an alternative to traditional Hispanic networks. The service's initial rollout on the station began with a branded programming block of eight hours of customized content from 3 to 11 p.m.[48] CNN Latino shut down in February 2014.[49]

In the FCC's incentive auction in 2017, KBEH sold its spectrum for $146,627,980 and indicated that it would enter into a post-auction channel sharing agreement.[50] KBEH then reached a channel sharing agreement with KWHY-TV (channel 22); Hero Broadcasting also agreed to sell the KBEH license to KWHY's owner, Meruelo Television, for $10 million. It was the first "zombie" station—a license without a channel—to be sold after the auction.[51]

Meruelo relaunched KBEH in May 2018, focusing on the family and women's audiences with a variety of telenovelas including Rebeca, Camelia la Texana, and Las Aparicio.[52] Within months, the new format was scrapped, and the station began to air Canal de la Fe, a religious television channel from the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God.[53]

Technical information

Subchannels

The station's signal is multiplexed:

Subchannels of KBEH on the KWHY-TV multiplex[54]
Channel Res. Aspect Short name Programming
63.1 720p 16:9 Univers Canal de la Fe (Spanish religious)
63.2 480i 4:3 Hrtland Heartland
63.3 RETRO Retro TV

Analog-to-digital conversion

KBEH shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 63, on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 24, using virtual channel 63.[55]

References

  1. ^ "Facility Technical Data for KBEH". Licensing and Management System. Federal Communications Commission.
  2. ^ "Final actions" (PDF). Broadcasting. November 6, 1972. p. 62. ProQuest 1016868786. Archived (PDF) from the original on March 8, 2021. Retrieved February 10, 2021.
  3. ^ "Oxnard TV Station Clears Major Hurdle". Oxnard Press-Courier. October 8, 1972. p. 9. Archived from the original on October 14, 2023. Retrieved February 10, 2021.
  4. ^ "Call letter application" (PDF). Broadcasting. November 27, 1972. p. 57. ProQuest 1014523774. Archived (PDF) from the original on March 8, 2021. Retrieved February 10, 2021.
  5. ^ "For the Record" (PDF). Broadcasting. March 8, 1976. p. 66. ProQuest 1016878337. Archived (PDF) from the original on March 8, 2021. Retrieved February 10, 2021.
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  52. ^ "Otto Padrón de Meruelo Media: El nuevo Canal 63 presenta una estrategia familiar y enfoque femenino" [Otto Padrón of Meruelo Media: The new Channel 63 offers a family strategy and focus on women]. Produ (in Spanish). May 8, 2018. Archived from the original on February 6, 2023. Retrieved December 1, 2023.
  53. ^ "¿Usted ya conoce el nuevo Canal 63.1?" [Have you heard of the new Channel 63.1?]. Templo de los Milagros Los Ángeles (in Spanish). August 10, 2018.
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  55. ^ "DTV Tentative Channel Designations for the First and Second Rounds" (PDF). Federal Communications Commission. May 23, 2006. Archived from the original (PDF) on August 29, 2013. Retrieved August 29, 2021.
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