TV station in Grand Island, Nebraska
KTVG-TV (channel 17) was a television station in Grand Island, Nebraska, United States, which broadcast from 1993 to 2010. It was affiliated for almost all of its history with Fox, broadcasting the network to the Tri-Cities area of the state. From 1996 to 2009, it was paired with KSNB-TV (channel 4) in Superior as "Fox 4 & 17".
KTVG-TV began broadcasting in 1993 as an independent station. The next year, operations were taken over by Fant Broadcasting, owner of the Nebraska Television Network (NTV), at which time KTVG joined Fox while the NTV network also broadcast Fox NFL football games. When NTV was sold to Pappas Telecasting in 1996, KSNB-TV was switched from ABC to Fox.
In 2009, Pappas converted KCWL-TV in Lincoln, an affiliate of The CW, to Fox as KFXL-TV "Fox Nebraska". The local marketing agreements that allowed Pappas to program KSNB-TV and KTVG-TV were allowed to lapse in November 2009 and April 2010, respectively. KTVG-TV shut down on April 5, 2010, and never returned to the air.
History
Establishment
Family Broadcasting Company of Fairfield, Iowa, applied in June 1984 for a construction permit to build channel 17 in Grand Island.[1] The construction permit was granted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on February 27, 1986. By 1989, Jerry Montgomery, the owner of Family Broadcasting, intended for the station to be an affiliate of Fox and hoped it would carry Kansas City Royals baseball. Family also held construction permits in Joplin, Missouri, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa.[2] Montgomery's efforts to put KTVG-TV on the air were frustrated by issues securing a location for the transmitter facility, though by late 1989 he had secured a site on the Hall-Adams county line.[3] The station was still unbuilt in 1992, when Family Broadcasting applied to transfer the construction permit to KafCom, a business owned by the Kafka family.[4] The KafCom acquisition never materialized, leaving Montgomery to build KTVG himself.[5]
KTVG-TV quietly debuted in late March or early April 1993.[6][7] During the soft launch, the station broadcast for eight hours each weekday with no recording capability; every single program aired had to be carried live from a satellite feed until appropriate equipment was installed.[7] Financial assistance for the construction of the new station had been provided by Robert Hill, a staff member at WNAL-TV in Gadsden, Alabama, who then bought the station under the name Hill Broadcasting in May.[8][9] Hill had learned about KTVG from WNAL-TV's owner, Anthony J. Fant. Fant was in the middle of purchasing the Nebraska Television Network (NTV), the region's ABC affiliate. George Singleton, who was intended to become general manager of NTV once the sale was finalized, had already relocated to Grand Island.[10] In July 1993, just as the FCC approved the sale,[11] KTVG sustained flood damage at its site on Engleman Road and was out of service until September, as equipment had to be removed and reassembled; Singleton served as KTVG's temporary general manager and was later replaced by a WNAL-TV employee.[10]
Fox affiliation
Once the flood damage was repaired, KTVG rapidly upgraded its programming and facilities. In December 1993, the station signed a contract to carry Royals baseball games in 1994;[10] two months later, Hill announced plans to rebuild the station with more power and tower height to allow it to cover Hastings and Kearney in addition to Grand Island, and it was broadcasting from 7 a.m. to midnight.[6] On April 1, 1994, NTV took over the operations of KTVG under a local marketing agreement (LMA).[12] After the LMA was signed, KTVG then became an affiliate of the Fox network, a deal that also allowed the NTV ABC stations to carry the new NFL on Fox football package;[13][14] this was subsequently supplemented by a secondary UPN affiliation when that network began operations in January 1995.[15][16] For several years thereafter, KTVG carried live simulcasts of NTV's newscasts.[16][12]
Pappas Telecasting took over KTVG's operations on July 1, 1996, after it agreed to purchase NTV from Fant and immediately assumed control under an LMA; that September, Pappas converted KSNB-TV—as well as its translators in Beatrice and Lincoln—from a satellite of KHGI to satellite of KTVG, expanding the availability of Fox programming in central Nebraska. The combined service was known as "Fox 4 & 17".[12][17] Pappas also built a new tower for the station near Wood River; the improved facility, activated in January 1999, extended KTVG-TV's coverage area in time for Super Bowl XXXIII and was intended as a temporary site until a planned 2,000-foot (610 m) tower at Ravenna was completed.[18]
KTVG and KSNB-TV dropped the secondary UPN affiliation in January 1998;[19] however, the network's programming returned to the stations in 2000.[20] This was noteworthy because Time Warner Cable, which ran the cable system in Lincoln, added KSNB to its lineup in early 2003 expressly because of its carriage of select UPN programs.[21] UPN programming was removed again in September 2005, when KOLN and KGIN launched a UPN-affiliated subchannel.[22]
KSNB and KTVG began broadcasting network programming in high definition on January 1, 2009, prior to the broadcast of the Orange Bowl. On June 12, 2009, Pappas converted KCWL-TV, an affiliate of The CW it managed in Lincoln, to Fox Nebraska as KFXL-TV.[23] This fulfilled an ambition of Pappas that dated to the late 1990s.[24] Additionally, Fox Nebraska was added to subchannels of the NTV stations at Kearney and Hayes Center—KHGI-TV and KWNB-TV.[25] This came months after a web page briefly indicated that the Fox affiliation would move to subchannels of KOLN and KGIN, a page labeled by a station official as a "leftover piece of an experimental project".[26]
Replacement and closure
With Fox network coverage shifted to KFXL and the NTV transmitters, the operations agreements Pappas held to run KSNB-TV and KTVG-TV were allowed to expire. The time brokerage agreement between Pappas Telecasting and Colins Broadcasting Corporation, owner of KSNB-TV, expired on November 30, 2009; that station, along with two translator stations in Lincoln owned by Colins, shut down on December 1. (A third Colins-owned translator, K17CI in Beatrice, had left the air on June 12, 2009.)[27] KSNB subsequently broadcast intermittently as an affiliate of the Three Angels Broadcasting Network;[28] in 2012, Gray Television, the owners of KOLN/KGIN, would acquire KSNB for $1.25 million[29] and make it a MyNetworkTV affiliate, shared with a pre-existing subchannel of KOLN/KGIN.[30]
KTVG-TV ceased broadcasting on April 5, 2010.[31] The FCC canceled its license on April 22, 2014; this was due to the 2012 expiration of both its construction permit for its post-digital transition facility on channel 16 (which had been tolled due to a bankruptcy proceeding Hill Broadcasting was involved in) and special temporary authority to continue operating its pre-transition channel 19 digital facility, not operating for over a year, and failure to file for license renewal.[32]
Repeaters
By 2009, Fox Nebraska was seen over six low-power repeaters—all of which were located on the UHF band. K17CI, relaying KSNB-TV, shut down upon the digital television transition for full-power stations on June 12, 2009, and the Lincoln transmitters—owned by Colins—closed on November 30 when KSNB-TV left the air. The remaining transmitters, as well as KFXL in its early months on air, were fed directly from the KTVG-TV transmitter.[27][25]
