History
KHOU signed on as KGUL-TV (as in gulf or as in "seagull" ), licensed to Galveston, on March 23, 1953 by Paul Taft of the Taft Broadcasting Co. (not related to Taft Broadcasting Company of Cincinnati, Ohio). It was the second television station to launch in the Houston area after KPRC-TV. One of the original investors in the station was actor James Stewart, along with a small group of other Galveston investors.
In 1956, the original owners sold Channel 11 to the Whitney Corporation (later Corinthian Broadcasting) of Indianapolis, which became a subsidiary of Dun & Bradstreet in 1971. In June 1959, it changed its calls to KHOU and moved the city of license to Houston. The FCC license listed both the Houston and Galveston service areas for a time. On April 24, 1960, the station moved to its present location just outside downtown Houston on Allen Parkway. To this date, KHOU is the only TV station in Houston to have its primary studios close to the downtown area.
In 1984, D&B sold the Corinthian stations to Belo. In 1998, it was the first station in the market to sign on with a high-definition signal. The KHOU studios were flooded during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001, resulting in damage to much of the station, including its newsroom. The flooding was so bad, the station had to shut down and air a feed from the station's doppler radar for roughly 90 minutes.
In 2002, the Houston Texans began play in the National Football League, playing in the American Football Conference South Division. As part of the AFC, all afternoon road games (and home games against AFC opponents) are aired on CBS, and so they air locally on KHOU. The Texans are one of two teams never to have been blacked out at home, the other being the Baltimore Ravens.
During Hurricane Ike, which hit the Texas Gulf Coast the weekend of September 12–14, 2008, KHOU's coverage was distributed nationwide via DirecTV and XM Satellite Radio, as well as a live feed on the station's Web site.
Since the June 12, 2009 digital transition, KHOU-DT moved to channel 11, and then by the following week, the station dropped the -TV suffix like most Belo stations.
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)