KTIE-TV/KADY-TV Ventura 1980’s in the clip and as of 2025 known as the new KWHY-TV Los Angeles. This is one of the independent tv stations back in the 1980’s that aimed for parts of the Los Angeles TV market like Ventura county at the time of the clips.
Oxnard/Ventura was my hometown market and I was still living there when KTIE-TV went on the air. (In fact, since I was the Chief Operator of KKBZ-FM during part of the period when they were erecting the tower on South Mountain, I was able to see their progress just by comparing my observations from the weekly transmitter inspections for my own station.)
That station was destined for failure. The CP had originally been issued back in September 1972 to a woman in Malibu who had a pipe dream about creating an independent educational station; the sum total of her television experience was as a freelance film and television writer, according to the report of the CP's issuance in
Broadcasting.
Where she thought the estimated $154,000 construction cost was coming from -- or the $75,000 first-year operating cost, for that matter -- as she projected zero revenue. (Like I said, a pipe dream.)
In 1982, she sold the CP to Colorado real estate investor Thorne Donnelley Jr., who put it on the air with great fanfare on August 17, 1985 after building a fairly extensive facility next door to Oxnard Cablevision. Donnelley and a group of investors he brought in overspent on programming, including a movie library which rivaled the VHF independents in Los Angeles, hired a full news department, and proceeded to run at a loss every year until 1988, when they sold it to Meshulam Riklis, whose other holdings included the Riviera hotel in Las Vegas, Faberge cosmetics, and Botany 500 menswear. He changed the call letters to KADY, which was the name of his daughter with Pia Zadora. Riklis also expanded up the Central Coast by building KADE/33 in San Luis Obispo, which became the UPN affiliate for that market and a simulcast of KADY at all other times.
(It should be pointed out that part of KTIE's problem was that they signed on just as the "must carry" rules were struck down by a federal court, and that delayed cable carriage for months afterwards ... they weren't on cable in Santa Barbara for their first two years!)
After a series of ownership restructuring -- and losing control of KADE after only a couple of years, the entire enterprise went bankrupt in 1996, and KADY was purchased out of the bankruptcy (KADE eventually became KTAS under new owners as a Telemundo affiliate). Biltmore asked for a three-fold increase in ERP and contracted with KEYT/3 in Santa Barbara to produce the 10:00pm newscast.
There were more financial problems, including at one point a takeover bid from Bud Paxson as he was building his PAX network during yet another bankruptcy, only to end uo in the hands of a media broker who engineered channel 63's move to Mount Wilson and its simultanous sale to Bela Broadcasting, which went all-Spanish language as KBEH. Bela sold to Hero Broadcasting a few years later, and they sold the license to Meruelo Media during the digital repack that found it sharing Meruelo's KWHY signal.
When Meruelo sold KWHY to the Church of Scientology eight years later, he took the call letters with him to channel 63. It has an "iffy" signal because KSCN/KWHY is on VHF channel 4 now.
Yeah, I know ... TMI and TL;DR.
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