History
KABB was launched as an independent station on December 16, 1987 — The now sister KMYS (then KRRT) became a charter Fox affiliate a year earlier in 1986. KABB was initially owned by the Alamo Broadcasting Corporation before it was sold to River City Broadcasting in 1989. In 1995, after KRRT gave up Fox for UPN affiliation, KABB picked up the Fox affiliation and has been a Fox station ever since. River City merged with Sinclair in 1996. The next year, Glencairn, Ltd. bought KRRT, which had entered into a local marketing agreement with KABB two years earlier. However, Glencairn's stock was almost completely controlled by Sinclair's principals, making it a shell corporation for Sinclair (see Cunningham Broadcasting). Sinclair bought KRRT outright in 2001.
In late 2006, 4Kids TV programming moved to sister station KMYS to accommodate an expansion of the morning newscast Fox News First. This follows part of a 12-year trend of Fox affiliates pre-empting network Kids programming from its days as Fox Kids.
On May 15, 2012, Sinclair Broadcast Group and Fox agreed to a five-year extension to the network's affiliation agreement with Sinclair's 19 Fox stations, including KABB, allowing them to continue to carry the network's programming through 2017.
On July 19, 2012, Sinclair announced that it would acquire NBC affiliate WOAI-TV from High Plains Broadcasting as part of its purchase of six television stations plus control of two others from Newport Television. As a Sinclair purchase of WOAI-TV would normally violate Federal Communications Commission regulations that disallow more than two full-power stations in a single market from being under the same ownership, Sinclair spun off KMYS to Deerfield Media (as Sinclair has cited in its application that WOAI and KABB are the market's fourth- and fifth-ranked stations, respectively, in total viewership). However, Sinclair retained control of KMYS through a shared services agreement. The Sinclair and Deerfield Media deals were consummated on December 3, 2012. At present it is unknown if the operations of KABB and KMYS will be integrated with those of WOAI-TV.
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