History
The station signed on the air in 1954 as KULA-TV. Originally, the KHVH-TV calls belonged to a then-independent station that operated on channel 13 in Honoulu when it began operations in 1957, but it would later merge with KULA in 1958 under the ownership of KHVH's parent company Kaiser Broadcasting, who then changed the KULA calls letters to KHVH-TV after it purchased channel 4 from the original owners in 1959. Kaiser then later sold the station to Western Telestations in December 1964 to help fund its new chain of independent stations on the mainland. Western Telestations became a wholly owned subsidiary of Lexington, Kentucky-based Starr Broadcasting Company in 1973. Around that time the station adopted its present-day KITV call to reflect its service of broadcasting to the Hawaiian Islands.
Shamrock Broadcasting, a new company founded by Roy E. Disney, bought out Starr Broadcasting (including KITV) in 1979. Eight years later, Shamrock sold KITV to Tak Communications (Sharad Tak). Tak would declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1991 and was later taken over by a group of creditors. During Tak's bankruptcy Freedom Communications made an offer to purchase KITV, but later withdrew its bid. In 1995 rumors circulated that it would join NBC when KHON-TV -- which had been Hawaii's NBC affiliate for 43 years (1953–1996) -- decided to join Fox during the "Big Network Switch" of 1994-96. However, later in 1995, Argyle Television Holdings II bought KITV and then-sister station WGRZ-TV in Buffalo, New York from Tak's creditors. In the end KITV stayed with ABC and NBC instead signed with KHNL as its new affiliate in 1996.
When Argyle Television Holdings II merged with the Hearst Corporation's broadcasting unit in 1997, KITV and its satellites became part of the newly formed TV station group then known as Hearst-Argyle Television. Hearst bought out the remainder of the company in mid-2009, dropping the word "Argyle" from the company's name.
KITV also has an affiliation with CNN which used KITV's live broadband stream to report on a magnitude-6.6 earthquake that struck off the northwestern coast of Hawaii County on October 15, 2006. Since KITV was the only station in Hawaii to air live coverage of the earthquake after the event (most other stations in Honolulu continued on with their normal morning programming), they also attracted a flood of phone calls and e-mails from people around the world trying to find out if their loved ones were all right. The live stream also attracted the attention of The Daily Show the following day (October 16), thanks in part to a building manager mentioning via public address system that the building's bathrooms were still operational while the news anchors were still on the air.
The station has been an ABC affiliate since its sign-on, making KITV one of the two major television stations in Honolulu that has never changed its network affiliation; local CBS outlet KGMB is the other.
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