KCSG - History

History

KCSG began as KCCZ, with a construction permit issued on June 11, 1984 to Michael Glenn Golden. After several extensions and replacements of expired permits, and transfer of the permit to Liberty Broadcasting Company, KCCZ came on the air in May 1990 as an independent station and was licensed by the FCC on June 21, 1990. The station would be short-lived. Financial difficulties doomed KCCZ and it ceased broadcasting in November 1992. Liberty Broadcasting filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy on December 17, 1992, but the filing had to be converted to Chapter 7 Bankruptcy on June 22, 1993. On October 20, Seagull Communications Company filed an application to acquire the station out of bankruptcy and on November 12, changed its call letters to KSGI-TV. The acquisition was approved by the FCC and consummated February 1, 1994. Seagull Communications returned the station to air the same day, again as an independent station.

Almost immediately, the new owners applied to the FCC to build booster stations serving St. George, Utah and Beaver Dam, Arizona/Mesquite, Nevada, communities cut off from the signal by mountainous terrain. The FCC granted the construction permit for the St. George booster, KSGI1 (later KCSG1), on February 28, 1995, but did not grant a permit for the Beaver Dam booster, KSGI2 (later KCSG2), until January 1998. That station was never built, but the construction permit remained in the FCC database until 2009.

In 1997, Seagull Communications sold KSGI-TV to Bonneville Holding Company, a broadcasting company wholly owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The sale was approved by the FCC on December 10, 1997 and was consummated on April 27, 1998. On February 16, 1998, the station changed its call letters to KXIV, in anticipation of its DTV channel assignment on UHF channel 14, but the FCC adopted the virtual channel standard, whereby digital stations would continue to identify by their analog channel assignment, and on May 15, 1998, the station again changed call letters, this time to KCSG. That August, the station affiliated with Pax TV, a network formed to bring family-friendly entertainment to the airwaves. In August 2002, the station was sold to Broadcast West, a St. George-based partnership of Daniel Matheson and local auto dealer Stephen Wade. The new owners elected to continue the Pax affiliation and to maintain an association with Bonneville-owned KSL-TV.

Broadcast West began to make changes to KCSG that would establish its identity as a Southern Utah television station. In 2003, they began a local TV news operation, the first in the region. Before, the only TV news available to residents of Cedar City and St. George was from the Salt Lake City-area stations. In June 2005, with Pax TV heading in a different direction, KCSG switched affiliation to America One, continuing to offer family-focused programming. The station made news in September 2005, when it began offering its news programs in Spanish, as well as in English, attempting to serve the region's growing Hispanic population. The Broadcast West partnership was dissolved on October 18, 2005, and a new company, Southwest Media, owned by Stephen Wade, became the licensee.

On August 18, 2008, KCSG replaced Salt Lake City's KJZZ-TV as Utah's MyNetworkTV affiliate. The station added an RTV affiliation, previously held in the market by KUSG and KCBU, in 2009.

For a time, starting on September 20, 2010, KCSG was one of two MyNetworkTV affiliates serving the geographically large Utah media market, along with KUSG; the affiliation was subsequently ceded completely to the renamed KMYU.

On January 24, 2011, KCSG announced that they were adding two digital subchannels. 14.2 now airs My Family TV and 14.3 airs local information and music. On September 5, 2011, KCSG added classic television network Me-TV to 14.1.

On July 26, 2012, KCSG added FamilyNet to Baja Broadband Channel 87. FamilyNet is limited to cable and satellite viewing because of programming restrictions placed on it by the network. Otherwise, FamilyNet would have been added to digital subchannel 14.4.