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KSBW Celebrates Its 70th Anniversary Serving California’s Central Coast

Originally the TV station started of as a sharetime arrangement with a Monterey station.

Was not KSBW's transmitter site further north for a few years? Maps now show it at Fremont Peak.
 
RF101 said:
Originally the TV station started of as a sharetime arrangement with a Monterey station.

Was not KSBW's transmitter site further north for a few years? Maps now show it at Fremont Peak.
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It was on Mount Madonna for a short time, but moved but moved back. I think the former NBC affiliate KRON complained about 8's signal being closer.
 
It was KMBY-TV that was the original sharetime partner station until 1955. KSBW-FM also existed for many years, Wikipedia has a good summary of the history.
 
K.M. Richards said:
My article on share-time television stations is a little more detailed (and accurate) than Wikipedia.

History of UHF Television

uhfhistory.com uhfhistory.com
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Great article! After reading it, it looks to me like shared-time broadcasting was an exercise in futility, seems it would be easier just for each broadcaster to take a 50% share in a combined company, run it as one station, and split the profits 50-50. First of all, the two stations couldn't really "compete", in that when one is off the air, the other one is on (the WENS/WQED situation was sui generis). And as FCC Commissioner Doerfer rightly pointed out, viewers really don't care. It must have seemed kind of convoluted to those same viewers, for different call letters being used, depending upon time of day.

I'm also reminded here of how Thames Television and London Weekend Television (LWT) shared the ITV franchise in Greater London, though they only handed off once a week, not during dayparts. I suppose it worked well enough.

So far as I could tell, none of the stations in the article had separately located transmitters. Were there any other instances where shared-time broadcasters did have separate towers? That could have presented a problem for viewers for whom the two transmitters were in different directions. Or would that have been a non-starter?
 
One interesting thing about that market was that, until the whole KRON-KNTV-NBC debacle 24 years ago, its ABC affiliate was San Jose's KNTV which, technically speaking, wasn't in the market. It was receivable there since channel 11 was on Loma Prieta. After NBC bought KNTV, local cable systems imported KGO-TV for a while. When HDTV took off, KSBW put ABC programming on a side channel.
 
IM42A said:
Great article! After reading it, it looks to me like shared-time broadcasting was an exercise in futility, seems it would be easier just for each broadcaster to take a 50% share in a combined company, run it as one station, and split the profits 50-50. First of all, the two stations couldn't really "compete", in that when one is off the air, the other one is on (the WENS/WQED situation was sui generis). And as FCC Commissioner Doerfer rightly pointed out, viewers really don't care. It must have seemed kind of convoluted to those same viewers, for different call letters being used, depending upon time of day.
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Thanks for the kind words. There are only a handful of articles on the site which are centered on VHF stations ... or even UHFs that didn't fail in the long run; back when the late Clarke Ingram owned the site and I was just coordinating content and writing a whole lot of same, we decided that there were stories like this, the Overmyer Network, and the early history of WTBS to "bend the rules" and include them. I would also like to thank Clarke posthumously for handing me the site ownership prior to his passing away last November and to our own David Eduardo (Gleason) for offering to host the site on the World Radio History servers. I believe that the history needs to be preserved as much as is possible, because those who could tell the stories first hand are pretty much no longer with us.

To reply to the above: Given the circumstances of each, I think the motivation to get on the air without the delay of comparative hearings (which were the norm for competing applications back then ... the auctions for available allocations wasn't even a probability on anyone's radar yet) overrode any consideration of the downside of a channel share. I also don't think competition was as much of a factor in the television industry back then -- at least from a local perspective -- as it has become in modern times.

But I also think you are right about a merged corporate entity making more sense. What I don't cover in that article are the dozens of early situations where competing applicants did merge to get the FCC grant; what was no different about those was one party eventually buying out the other after some period of operation. And except for the Lansing and Pittsburgh situations, where one station was a non-commercial educational, the same network affiliated with both stations in a time-share (CBS in Kansas City and Rochester, ABC/DuMont in Minneapolis, and all four in Salinas). Of course, that was not a factor in Phoenix or Chicago.

As far as the call letters are concerned, even with high profile handoffs like Kansas City, I suspect more viewers just thought of the stations by channel number (e.g., KMBC-TV and WHB-TV were just "channel 9").
 
K.M. Richards said:
As far as the call letters are concerned, even with high profile handoffs like Kansas City, I suspect more viewers just thought of the stations by channel number (e.g., KMBC-TV and WHB-TV were just "channel 9").
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Kansas City newspaper ads of the time, jointly placed by the two stations, emphasized "Channel 9" but downplayed the call letters and the shifts required in the share-time operation. A big ad in the August 3, 1953 issues of the Star and Times included this explanation:
It will not be necessary for viewers to touch their sets when WHB-TV signs over to KMBC-TV or vice versa. It should be made clear that broadcasts of both stations are being made with the same transmission equipment and on Channel 9.
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Indeed, published schedules didn't delineate which shows were on WHB-TV and which ones were on KMBC-TV. It was all just "Channel 9". Sharp-eyed viewers probably could have noticed the difference in local, live programming, since the two licensees had separate studios. In the Star's article on the FCC grant (June 25, 1953), the handoffs between the licensees were listed.
 
Mark Roberts said:
One interesting thing about that market was that, until the whole KRON-KNTV-NBC debacle 24 years ago, its ABC affiliate was San Jose's KNTV which, technically speaking, wasn't in the market. It was receivable there since channel 11 was on Loma Prieta. After NBC bought KNTV, local cable systems imported KGO-TV for a while. When HDTV took off, KSBW put ABC programming on a side channel.
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So far as I'm aware, there was no "rule", for lack of a better word, saying that the stations of a given ADI (Arbitron) or DMA (Nielsen) actually had to be geographically located within the market. KNTV was a quirk in that it was located in the San Francisco market, yet served as the ABC affiliate (not just an out-of-market "default" affiliate such as you have in infill markets such as Zanesville or Parkersburg) for a separate San Jose-Salinas-Monterey market that didn't include San Jose. The only other example I can think of, is when WOUB Athens OH was considered a Columbus-market station even though, at the time, it was in the Charleston-Huntington DMA (I think I'm right on that). Athens County ping-ponged back and forth until it finally landed in the Columbus market.
 
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I remember back in the 70s KSBW was a sister station to KSBY 6 San Luis Obispo and was referred as the Gold Coast TV Network, carrying to same programming, NBC network and all Syndicated programs with their own separate commercials and newscast.
 
Tiger Cox said:
I remember back in the 70s KSBW was a sister station to KSBY 6 San Luis Obispo and was referred as the Gold Coast TV Network, carrying to same programming, NBC network and all Syndicated programs with their own separate commercials and newscast.
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Alredy referenced in the article I linked to back at post #5.
 
K.M. Richards said:
Alredy referenced in the article I linked to back at post #5.
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I guess I overlooked that, in the70s I had a tall large VHF antenna, and I picked up KSBW 8 and KNTV 11 from the San Joaquin Valley they were aligned with Pacheco pass, the TV Guide was the Central Ca edition which listed KSBY 6, KCOY 12, and KEYT 3 and noticed 6 and 8 listings was identical.
 
Tiger Cox said:
the TV Guide was the Central Ca edition which listed KSBY 6, KCOY 12, and KEYT 3 and noticed 6 and 8 listings was identical.
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My first clue about that, before I knew much about television, was discovering that KSBY-TV used to have the call letters KVEC-TV. I later had a chance to visit the station, which was co-owned and co-located with Sonic Cable; I was told that the only studio facilities for channel 6 were at the transmitter site, because aside from the San Luis Obispo newscasts everything came from Salinas!
 
Tiger Cox said:
I guess I overlooked that, in the70s I had a tall large VHF antenna, and I picked up KSBW 8 and KNTV 11 from the San Joaquin Valley they were aligned with Pacheco pass, the TV Guide was the Central Ca edition which listed KSBY 6, KCOY 12, and KEYT 3 and noticed 6 and 8 listings was identical.
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If the only thing KSBY originated was local newscasts, inserted into the KSBW feed, the TV Guide probably wouldn't have indicated any differentiation in programming. It would just have the generic designation "news", or "news, weather, and sports", usually clustered with other stations running the same type of programming at the same time.
 
Michael Rivers Kramer said:
It was more than that. They had too much to overlap with KCRA-TV which Hearst was working to purchase at the time. Also, KRON probably didn’t appreciate having KSBW having a strong signal in the South Bay.
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There was speculation at one time, back in the day, that KSBW-TV might move its transmitter from Fremont Pk to Loma Prieta where KNTV was from the beginning. That way both stations would be receivable in San Jose. Apparently, the thinking was, if that happened, San Jose could then be drawn into the the Santa Cruz-Salinas/Monterey DMA, thereby greatly increasing the size of the market. If those two stations (8 NBC and 11 ABC) would have had the majority of NBC and ABC viewing in the San Jose area, would this market change have been possible?
 
TomásEstefan said:
There was speculation at one time, back in the day, that KSBW-TV might move its transmitter from Fremont Pk to Loma Prieta where KNTV was from the beginning. That way both stations would be receivable in San Jose. Apparently, the thinking was, if that happened, San Jose could then be drawn into the the Santa Cruz-Salinas/Monterey DMA, thereby greatly increasing the size of the market. If those two stations (8 NBC and 11 ABC) would have had the majority of NBC and ABC viewing in the San Jose area, would this market change have been possible?
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Given that ABC was reluctant to allow KNTV to affiliate in the first place, I doubt it. In fact, I think KRON would have made a big stink and gotten NBC to de-affiliate with KSBW.

As far as market designations, that's always been Nielsen's call.
 
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