KXII - History

History

The station was launched on August 12, 1956 from Ardmore, Oklahoma as KVSO-TV. There was common ownership with local radio station KVSO and a local newspaper, The Daily Ardmoreite. In its early years, channel 12 was an NBC affiliate. Unable to afford a network feed, station engineers switched to and from the signal of WKY-TV (now KFOR-TV) in Oklahoma City whenever NBC programming was shown. The station often carried some of WKY's non-network programming as well. In late-1958, the station was sold to Texoma Broadcasting and the call letters changed to KXII (signifying the Roman numeral 12).

In 1959, the transmitter was moved from its original location north of Ardmore to a point near Madill, Oklahoma about 25 miles (40 km) southeast of Ardmore in order to provide better reception to viewers in Durant, Oklahoma and across the Red River to the Sherman/Denison, Texas area. During the 1960s and into the 1970s, the station was a primary NBC affiliate but also held a secondary affiliation with CBS which began in 1960. CBS fare on channel 12 consisted mainly of daytime programs and sports coverage such as NFL football.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, most CBS programming for Texoma area viewers was fed to cable subscribers via affiliates in surrounding markets including KWTV in Oklahoma City, KAUZ-TV in Wichita Falls, and KRLD-TV (now KDFW-TV, currently a Fox owned-and-operated station) in Dallas/Fort Worth. KXII's direct competitor, KTEN channel 10 in Ada, Oklahoma was a primary ABC affiliate but also claimed NBC as a secondary affiliate. Though KXII and KTEN were considered direct competitors, both stations had considerable differences in fringe coverage for many years due to the 75-mile (121 km) distances between the two station's transmitters at Madill and Ada. This meant that viewers within the a 25-mile (40 km) radius of KXII's transmitter at Madill including Ardmore and Durant were actually in the southern fringe of KTEN's transmitting range which resulted in poorer over-the-air reception on channel 10 than channel 12. Channel 10 did not even reach viewers in the Sherman/Denison area or other portions of north Texas served by KXII.

Similarly, KTEN's city of license, Ada, was in the northern fringe of KXII's transmitting range resulting in poor over-the-air reception of channel 12. To better compete with KXII, KTEN moved its transmitter in 1984 from Ada to a location near Bromide, Oklahoma which enabled better over-the-air reception to locations in far southern Oklahoma near the Red River and now expanded to serve Sherman/Denison and other cities in north Texas. KTEN also adopted KXII's mode of operating more than one studio by adding operations in Ardmore and Denison and later relocating the main studios from Ada to Denison.

Starting with the 1974-1975 fall season, KXII's program schedule included a larger proportion of CBS programming including most daytime shows, many prime-time programs and most sports programming. This made channel 12 a hybrid station with almost half the programming of both NBC and CBS airing for a few years. As KXII shifted its programming emphasis from NBC to CBS in the mid-1970s, KTEN added a larger proportion of NBC programming to its daytime and primetime schedule to become a similar hybrid ABC and NBC station in the process. For the 1977-1978 season, channel 12 shifted its primary network affiliation to CBS and became an exclusive affiliate with the network in 1985 when the last NBC program on KXII's schedule, Today, was replaced by CBS This Morning. Today then moved to KTEN which shifted NBC to a primary and later an exclusive affiliation.

Since the late 1990s, the two-station Sherman/Ada market has been represented entirely by one-network stations (not including digital subchannels). Throughout 2006, the station celebrated its 50th anniversary. In the Summer of that year, the station added programming from UPN on a new second digital subchannel and cable (known as "UPN Texoma"). This programming flipped to MyNetworkTV when UPN ceased operation on September 15. It has also added programming from Fox on a third digital subchannel as well as cable.