KMAX-TV - History

History

KMAX originally went on the air under the KMUV-TV callsign on October 5, 1974, operating from a studio facility located off of Highway 160 in Sacramento. The station was originally owned by legendary television producer Norman Lear, and had carried an all-movie format to counter-program against the area's other established stations, particularly then-independent station KTXL (now affiliated with Fox). However on May 1, 1976, KMUV abandoned its all-movie format and largely began to air Spanish-language programming, along with some English-language religious programming (such as The PTL Club). On April 2, 1981, Koplar Broadcasting (then-owner and founder St. Louis' KPLR-TV) purchased channel 31 and relaunched it on April 6 of that year under the callsign KRBK-TV (the callsign was named for company founder Harold Koplar's son, Robert "Bob" Koplar), formatted as an English-language general entertainment independent station to compete directly with KTXL.

Pappas Telecasting Companies purchased KRBK in 1994. On January 11, 1995, the station changed its call letters to KPWB-TV (for Pappas WB) to reflect its affiliation with The WB Television Network, which launched that same day. Paramount Stations Group bought the station in January 1998, this resulted in an affiliation swap with KQCA on January 5 of that year, that saw the UPN affiliation move to channel 31, which assumed the present callsign KMAX-TV, while The WB affiliation moved to KQCA. With Paramount's ownership stake in UPN, KMAX became the first station in Sacramento to be owned and operated by a major network. Viacom acquired CBS in 1999, merging Paramount Stations Group with CBS' owned-and-operated stations to form the Viacom Television Stations Group.

Channel 31 was the flagship television home of the NBA's Sacramento Kings from the 1988-89 season until the middle of the 2002-03 season, when the team's owners, the Maloof family, terminated the station's contract due to the station selling ads featuring the team without the Kings' permission. KMAX remains the local over-the-air affiliate of the San Francisco Giants Major League Baseball franchise. It also held local broadcast rights to the Oakland Athletics before that team moved all its telecasts to regional sports network Comcast SportsNet California in 2009.

In May 2005, Viacom bought KOVR from the Sinclair Broadcast Group, creating a duopoly with KMAX; the station also relocated to KOVR's studios in West Sacramento. Seven months later, Viacom divested itself of CBS due to the company's split into two separate entities (one of which retained the Viacom name), KOVR and KMAX, along with the other CBS and UPN stations operated by Viacom, became part of the newly-formed CBS Corporation.

With the merger of UPN and the WB on into The CW, owned by a joint venture of Warner Bros. and CBS, KMAX, as a CBS-owned UPN affiliate, was the natural choice to become the market's affiliate of the new network, and was a charter affiliate of the network on September 18, 2006. The station changed its on-air branding from "UPN 31" to "CW31" one month before the The CW's September 18 launch to reflect this.

As the Sacramento affiliate of The CW, KMAX clears the network's entire programming schedule; however due to the weekend morning edition of Good Day Sacramento, the station runs the network's Vortexx animation lineup for children on Saturdays on a four-hour tape delay airing from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. (instead of the network-recommended to 7 a.m. to noon timeslot for the block). During its early years of CW affilation, the station had ran the Kids' WB and The CW4Kids/Toonzai blocks on a three-hour tape delay.