KFMB-TV - History

History

KFMB-TV went on the air on May 16, 1949, as San Diego's first television station. It was owned by Jack O. Gross along with KFMB radio. San Diego Mayor Harley E. Knox was present at its first broadcast. It has always been a CBS affiliate, and is the only station in the city to have never changed its affiliation. However, in the early years, it carried programs from ABC, NBC, and DuMont until other stations signed on.

KFMB signed an affiliation agreement with the short-lived Paramount Television Network in October 1949, and quickly became that network's strongest affiliate. The station received a network feed of Paramount programs which included Hollywood Opportunity, Meet Me in Hollywood, Magazine of the Week, Time For Beany, Your Old Buddy, and others; the station aired six hours of Paramount programs each week. As there was no technical transmission network for Paramount programming, KFMB instead had the network's programming fed from Los Angeles station KTLA's signal atop Mount Lee, 90 miles away in Hollywood to the KFMB transmitter site on Mount Soledad.

In 1953, Gross sold KFMB-AM-TV to Wrather-Alvarez Broadcasting. When the Wrather-Alvarez partnership broke up in 1957, Wrather kept KFMB-AM-FM-TV as part of Marietta Broadcasting. In 1959, Wrather sold Marietta Broadcasting to Transcontinent Broadcasting of Buffalo, New York. Transcontinent merged with the Taft Television and Radio Co., Inc. in 1964. However, the merger left Taft with two television stations (since the company would have ended up with six VHF stations and three UHF stations) plus several radio stations exceeding the FCC's ownership limit of the time. As a result, the KFMB television and radio stations were sold to their current owner, San Diego-based Midwest Television. In the 1990s, Midwest Television divested its original stations, WCIA/Champaign, Illinois and WMBD-TV-AM-WPBG/Peoria, Illinois, leaving only the KFMB station cluster.

In 1998, KFMB-TV was awarded the local broadcast rights to San Diego Chargers football telecasts for regular season and preseason games (with the exception of two games each preseason involving an NFC team playing a road game against the Chargers, which are instead shown on Fox affiliate KSWB-TV). As the NFL team's de facto local television home in the market, KFMB currently airs all Chargers afternoon road games due to broadcast rights held by CBS to the American Football Conference as part of the NFL on CBS television package, as well as some sold-out home games in which the team plays against an AFC opponent (Chargers regular season games in which the team's opponent involves a team in the National Football Conference are also broadcast on KSWB-TV, due to Fox's broadcast rights to that conference). KFMB also runs Chargers telecasts that are produced by ESPN and NFL Network, and in doing so, this satisfies the NFL's requirement of making games available to viewers who do not have access to the aforementioned networks in each team's primary market.

In 2005, Midwest Television and CBS signed a ten-year contract extension for KFMB to remain a CBS affiliate. The station rebranded itself as News 8 on September 19, 2005, after four years under the "Local 8" branding. In early 2007, KFMB began to rebrand itself as "CBS8", with the launch of their new website (with the News 8 title remaining in use for the station's newscasts).