Fiktiv USA - KPIX-TV

KPIX-TV, virtual channel 5 (UHF digital channel 29), is a CBS owned-and-operated television station licensed to San Francisco, California, United States and serving the San Francisco Bay Area. The station is owned by the CBS Television Stations subsidiary of ViacomCBS, as part of a duopoly with CW West Coast flagship KBCW (channel 44), also licensed to San Francisco.

The two stations share studios at Broadway and Battery Street, just north of San Francisco's Financial District; KPIX's transmitter is located atop Sutro Tower. In addition to KBCW, KPIX shares its building with formerly co-owned radio stations KCBS, KFRC-FM, KGMZ, KITS, KLLC and KRBQ, although they use a different address number for Battery Street (865 as opposed to 855).

KPIX signed on the air on December 22, 1948, the first television station in Northern California as well as the 49th in the United States. It was originally owned by Associated Broadcasters, owners of KSFO (560 AM). Initially, channel 5's signal was transmitted from the top of the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill. It later moved to a shared transmitter tower with KGO-TV (channel 7) at the Sutro Mansion (which was located midway between Mount Sutro and Twin Peaks), and then to the Sutro Tower in 1973. KPIX's first master control room was in the attic of the Mark Hopkins Hotel (just above the "Top of the Mark" bar).

The station immediately joined CBS due to a deal KSFO's owners had worked out with the television network one year earlier. KSFO was CBS radio's Bay Area affiliate from 1937 to 1941, when Associated Broadcasters backed out of a deal for CBS to buy the station. When KSFO was still affiliated with CBS, it was originally slated to move to 740 AM, the frequency of San Jose's KQW. 740 AM was the last 50,000-watt frequency available in the Bay Area, and KSFO was to raise its power to 50,000 watts after moving to 740. However, after KSFO parted ways with CBS radio, the network moved its Bay Area affiliation to KQW and was not about to give up the advantage of owning the Bay Area's last available 50,000-watt station. After lengthy Federal Communications Commission (FCC) hearings, KSFO won the 740 frequency, but later decided to stay at 560 and concentrate its efforts on building a television station. It traded the 740 frequency to CBS in return for getting the CBS television affiliation for the Bay Area. KQW remained at 740 and CBS changed its call sign to KCBS.

The station also carried programming from DuMont until that network folded in 1956. It even carried a few NBC programs until KRON-TV (channel 4) signed on in November 1949, and programs from the short-lived Paramount Television Network, such as Frosty Frolics, Time For Beany, Cowboy G-Men and Bandstand Revue.

When KPIX's first competitor, KGO-TV, signed on in May 1949, KPIX produced programs to welcome it into the Bay Area. KPIX cameras were used on the first episode of the CBS News program See It Now on November 18, 1951, which opened with the first live simultaneous coast-to-coast TV transmission from both the East Coast (the Brooklyn Bridge and New York Harbor) and the West Coast (KPIX-produced images of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay), under the narration of Edward R. Murrow. Under its first general manager, Phil Lasky, KPIX gained an early reputation for news coverage, being noted for originating national CBS coverage of the Japanese Peace Conference of 1951 (the event which "officially" brought an end to World War II, similar to the function that the Treaty of Versailles served for World War I), held in San Francisco (for which Lasky was commended by then-CBS News president Sig Mickelson), as well as local news coverage of the 1953 crash of an Australian airliner while on approach to San Francisco International Airport, and a powder explosion a few weeks afterward at an explosives plant in suburban Hercules. In regards to sports programming, KPIX broadcast the first Bay Area sports telecast on December 22, 1948, with a Pacific Coast Hockey League game between the San Francisco Shamrocks and Oakland Oaks. KPIX originated the annual college football East-West Shrine Game for DuMont, and was the flagship station of the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League until 1954.

In 1952, KPIX and KSFO moved into a new building at 2655 Van Ness Avenue; KPIX moved out of the facility in 1979, when it relocated to a converted 1920s era warehouse on the corner of Battery and Broadway streets (refurbished by the architecture firm Gensler), where KPIX remains to this day (KSFO moved to studios in the Fairmont Hotel, across the hall from the Tonga Room, in 1955. The studio on Van Ness Avenue (renamed to Bridge Studios after KPIX's departure) was the first building in San Francisco specifically built for television; the game show Starcade taped here after a pilot taped at KRON-TV's studios (it was demolished in 2006 to make way for a condominium complex).

Westinghouse Electric Corporation bought KPIX in 1954 and ran it as part of the company's Group W broadcasting unit. During Westinghouse's ownership, KPIX was the company's only television station on the West Coast. Additionally, it was one of two VHF stations (along with Pittsburgh's KDKA-TV) that didn't have a historic three-letter callsign, the only one to have a "K" callsign west of the Mississippi River, and along with WJZ-TV in Baltimore (until 2008) was the only one without a sister radio station with matching callsigns.

In late 1995, Westinghouse merged with CBS, making KPIX a CBS-owned station and bringing it into common ownership with KCBS radio. Prior to this, KPIX had been CBS' longest-tenured affiliate (a distinction that now belongs to Washington, D.C.'s WUSA). KPIX was also one of two longtime CBS affiliates owned by Group W that became a CBS O&O, the other being KDKA-TV. In 2000, the combined Westinghouse/CBS was bought by Viacom, and when Viacom split up its assets in December 2005, KPIX and the company's other broadcast properties became part of CBS Corporation. Since May 2003, KPIX-TV, KYW-TV and WJZ-TV are the only former Group W TV stations that still utilize the classic Group W font.

In May 2006, KPIX moved its San Jose news bureau to the Fairmont Tower at 50 W. San Fernando Street—which served as the original site of Charles Herrold's experimental radio broadcasts that were the precursor of KCBS. Although CBS was not aware of the significance of the San Fernando Street address when the move was planned, it quickly recognized and embraced its significance when informed, giving long-overdue credit to one of the inventors of radio broadcasting during the bureau's opening celebration.

On December 4, 2019, CBS Corporation and Viacom remerged into ViacomCBS.

KPIX's distinctive "5" logo dates back from the station's days under Westinghouse ownership, when the "Group W font" was standard on KPIX and its sister stations after about 1965. When Westinghouse merged with CBS, most of the former Group W stations eventually retired the font. KPIX, along with its Baltimore sister station WJZ-TV (an ABC affiliate during its pre-merger Group W history) and its Philadelphia sister station KYW-TV (an NBC affiliate during its pre-merger Group W history) would become the only three CBS-owned television stations to continue using this logo font.

KPIX was the only CBS-owned station on the West Coast not to follow the trend of other CBS-owned stations branding themselves as "CBS (channel number)" for years after the merger, simply referencing itself as "KPIX-TV Channel 5". Between 1993 and 1996, it was branded simply as "KPIX 5", even dropping the Eyewitness News title for its newscasts and branding them as KPIX 5 News at the same time, before reverting. In 2003, KPIX fell in line with its sister stations and rebranded as "CBS 5", and later to "CBS 5 Bay Area". On February 3, 2013, KPIX dropped the "CBS 5" branding and reverted to being branded as "KPIX 5".

As of September 2020, syndicated programs broadcast on KPIX include The Drew Barrymore Show, The People's Court, Judge Judy and Family Feud.

For most of the time before Westinghouse bought CBS, KPIX was the network's largest affiliate. Despite this, from the mid-1970s until 1994, it was standard practice for KPIX to preempt CBS' daytime programs such as The Price Is Right (for example, the first season of Tattletales was preempted for reruns of Perry Mason). Although CBS made in excess of 30 cuts to the violent content of Death Wish, both KPIX and sister station KDKA-TV preempted the network's 1976 airing of the film, having denounced the remaining violent content of the film and, as well, the apparent endorsement by the film of vigilante violence. Despite the preemptions, CBS was mostly satisfied with KPIX as it was among its highest-rated affiliates. In September 1994, two months after CBS signed a long-term affiliation deal with the Westinghouse stations (just before the two companies merged), KPIX began airing the entire CBS schedule without preemptions except for local news emergencies, as per the agreement between Westinghouse and CBS. However, it continued to run CBS prime time programming one hour earlier than typical for the Pacific Time Zone (from 7 to 10 p.m., instead of 8 to 11 p.m.), a practice dating back to 1992. This ended in 1998, and since then KPIX has aired the entire CBS schedule in pattern. KOVR in Sacramento adopted a similar practice after becoming a CBS affiliate in 1995, and continues this scheduling practice to this day, long after CBS bought the station in 2004. Any preempted shows air on CW O&O sister KBCW.

During the 1980s, KPIX was the flagship station for the Oakland Athletics baseball team (at times preempting or delaying CBS network shows for the live broadcasts), before the A's broadcasts moved to then-NBC affiliate KRON-TV the early 1990s; select A's and San Francisco Giants games were aired on KPIX from 1990 to 1993 as part of CBS' MLB broadcast contract. KPIX was also the television home of the Golden State Warriors basketball team during the 1990s. KPIX-TV was also the exclusive home of the Bay to Breakers, before it moved to KRON.

From 1956 to 1993, KPIX carried most San Francisco 49ers games locally as part of CBS' broadcast rights to the NFL, which covered the entire pre-merger league until 1970, and the National Football Conference from 1970 to 1993. Two of the 49ers' Super Bowl victories aired locally on KPIX: Super Bowl XVI and Super Bowl XXIV. KPIX lost the 49ers to KTVU (channel 2) in 1994 (a year after fan favorite Joe Montana was traded to the Kansas City Chiefs), when the NFC package moved to Fox. However, in 1998, the American Football Conference package moved to CBS from NBC, and KPIX has aired most Raiders games (both in Oakland and Las Vegas) since. However, KPIX will still air 49ers afternoon games if the team plays against an AFC team at Levi's Stadium. KPIX has also broadcast 49ers games in the immediate Bay Area market if the team plays on ESPN's Monday Night Football or more recently on Thursday Night Football, produced by NFL Network, in partnership with CBS Sports. In 2014, with the institution of the NFL's new 'cross-flex' rules, any games that involve the 49ers playing an NFC opponent can be moved from KTVU, and aired on KPIX. The station also provided local coverage of Super Bowl 50, which was played at Levi's Stadium.

KPIX-TV presently broadcasts 32½ hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with 5½ hours each weekday, and 3½ hours each on Saturdays and Sundays). For most of the last 30 years, KPIX has been a solid runner-up to KGO-TV in the Bay Area news ratings. KPIX utilizes a doppler weather radar system called "Hi-Def Doppler" during weather segments, which is located on Mount Vaca. KPIX-TV also produces a 10 p.m. newscast for CW owned-and-operated sister station KBCW, which debuted on March 3, 2008 and airs for one hour on Monday through Friday evenings and a half-hour on weekend evenings.

As the Bay Area's first television station, KPIX was a pioneer in local television news coverage in the region. Like most television stations, it presented a 15-minute evening news program until 1963, when the networks began expanding their evening newscasts to 30 minutes. One of KPIX's innovating program directors, Ray Hubbard, created The Noon News. The anchors were John Weston, "Channel 5's Guy on the Go", and Wanda Ramey (one of the first female news anchors on U.S. television), "Channel 5's Gal on the Go". From 1965 to 1994 and again from 1995, KPIX uses the Eyewitness News format originally adopted by Philadelphia sister station KYW-TV. KGO-TV also uses a similar format for its newscasts, but KPIX had the Eyewitness News name first; KGO adopted its version of the format from its New York City sister station WABC-TV. In 1966, KPIX hired the first African-American news reporters in the San Francisco television market: Ben Williams, who had been the first Black reporter for the San Francisco Examiner a few years earlier, and Belva Davis, the first female African-American reporter on the West Coast.

In 1993, the station moved its 11 p.m. newscast to 10:00 p.m. and expanded the program to one hour, as part of KPIX's "Early Prime" programming experiment which moved CBS's primetime lineup one hour early. Then-NBC affiliate KRON-TV also experimented with a 7-10 p.m. primetime block and ran a newscast at 10 p.m. during this time, but its newscast ran for only a half-hour before reverting to the standard 8-11 p.m. primetime scheduling after only a year; KPIX did not revert to the standard Pacific Time Zone primetime scheduling until 1998, after failing to make a dent in the ratings for long-dominant KTVU's 10 p.m. newscast.

KPIX was also home to 30 Minutes Bay Area, a half-hour news magazine produced in consultation with 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt after he retired from the national show. The "30 Minutes" concept was originally planned to air on many CBS-owned stations, but KPIX was the only station to implement the concept. 30 Minutes Bay Area was discontinued in early 2007. KPIX also was one of the first U.S. television stations to provide full-time environment reporting in its newscasts—"The Greenbeat" ran from 2007 to 2010, and featured reports by Jeffrey Schaub on environmental sustainability, green technology and earth awareness issues.

In 2007, Wendy Tokuda (who co-anchored channel 5's evening newscasts from 1978 to 1992), returned to KPIX and brought it "Students Rising Above" feature reports that she originated during her nine-year tenure with KRON-TV to the station; Tokuda founded the "Students Rising Above" student scholarship program in 1998. On January 28, 2008, KPIX became the third Bay Area television station to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition (behind KGO-TV and KTVU); most field reports were initially still broadcast in 4:3 standard definition (albeit pillarboxed), KPIX started using HD cameras for its field reports in September 2010, however, not all of the station's news footage is shot in HD.

In September 2010, KPIX introduced new graphics for its newscasts, a standardized package that was also rolled out to CBS's other news-producing O&O stations; this included the addition of "The Enforcer" music package by Gari Media Group, the basic theme of which has been used on many CBS-owned stations since the mid-1970s, when it was introduced by WBBM-TV. In January 2011, KPIX expanded its weekday morning newscast by a half-hour to 4:30 a.m. On January 8, 2012, KPIX began producing a Sunday morning newscast for sister station KBCW.

On January 14, 2019, the station debuted a new half-hour weekday newscast at 7:00 p.m., enabling KPIX to go head-to-head with a KTVU-produced newscast on KICU.

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KBCW, virtual channel 44 (UHF digital channel 28), is the West Coast flagship station of The CW Television Network, licensed to San Francisco, California, United States and serving the San Francisco Bay Area. The station is owned by the CBS Television Stations subsidiary of ViacomCBS, as part of a duopoly with CBS owned-and-operated station KPIX-TV (channel 5), also licensed to San Francisco. The two stations share studios at Broadway and Battery Street, just north of San Francisco's Financial District; KBCW's transmitter is located atop Sutro Tower. The station is available on channel 12 on most cable providers in the Bay Area and has equally promoted this channel placement in its branding for decades. There is no separate website for KBCW; instead, it is integrated with that of sister station KPIX-TV.

The station first signed on the air on January 2, 1968, as KBHK-TV (standing for Kaiser Broadcasting/Henry Kaiser); it was originally owned by Kaiser Broadcasting (established by steel/aluminum and shipbuilding industrialist Henry J. Kaiser [1882-1967]) and which owned other UHF independent stations in Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and Cleveland. KBHK-TV was the third independent station in the San Francisco Bay area behind San Jose-based KGSC-TV (channel 36, now KICU-TV) and Oakland-based KTVU (channel 2), and the first independent licensed to San Francisco.

The station was originally based in studios located at 650 California Street. Several key scenes from the Robert Redford-starring political election intrigue movie The Candidate (1970) were filmed in KBHK's studio at 420 Taylor Street (originally NBC "Red Network" Radio Studios). Many of KBHK's technicians appeared in the movie as themselves. Kaiser Broadcasting later merged with Chicago-based Field Communications (Marshall Field, (1834–1906, founder of empire including famous department store chain and later descendants branching into media with broadcasting flagship TV station WFLD among others, and daily newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times and defunct tabloid Chicago Daily News) in 1973 as part of a joint venture between the companies. In 1977, Kaiser sold its interest in the stations to Field, making Field the sole owner of KBHK. Field later put its stations up for sale in 1982, and KBHK was sold to United Television in 1983. KBHK maintained a general entertainment program schedule that included morning and afternoon children's blocks, off-network sitcoms (such as The Brady Bunch), feature films, and public affairs programming. At one point, KBHK advertised itself as the "Bay Area's Movie Station" and aired a movie in prime time six nights a week. At various times during the 1970s and 1980s, KBHK was the flagship TV affiliate of the Oakland Athletics, pre-empting regular programming to telecast the baseball games.

Several local programs produced at KBHK were syndicated nationally including Leonard Nimoy's Star Trek Memories (distributed by Paramount Television) and The Twilight Zone Special (distributed by Viacom). In 1993, the station began carrying programs from the Prime Time Entertainment Network programming service (which was owned jointly by Chris-Craft/United Television and Warner Bros. Entertainment) which it carried until January 1995.

In 1994, Chris-Craft/United Television partnered with Paramount Television to launch the United Paramount Network (UPN). As a result of Chris-Craft/United's interest in the network, UPN signed affiliation deals with both the company's independent stations (along with those owned by the Paramount Stations Group) to become charter owned-and-operated stations of the network. KBHK joined UPN when it launched on January 16, 1995. The station continued with its programming format, essentially continuing to program similarly to an independent as UPN would not expand to five nights a week of programming until 1998. The older sitcoms and cartoons (such as The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest and Sailor Moon) were gradually replaced during the late 1990s and early 2000s with more recent sitcoms, talk shows, game shows, court shows and reality shows.

In 2000, Viacom bought Chris-Craft's 50% ownership interest in UPN (which Chris-Craft had wholly owned, until Viacom acquired a stake in the network in 1996), stripping KBHK's status as an O&O. On August 12 of that year, Chris-Craft sold its UPN stations to the Fox Television Stations subsidiary of News Corporation for $5.5 billion; the deal that was finalized on July 31, 2001. Fox subsequently traded KBHK-TV to Viacom in exchange for KTXH in Houston and WDCA in Washington, D.C., thus returning KBHK's status as an O&O. Viacom had purchased CBS a year earlier, resulting in the creation of a duopoly between KBHK and CBS O&O KPIX.

The trade protected the former Cox-owned KTVU as the Bay Area's Fox affiliate (Fox would later purchase KTVU and sister station KICU in exchange for their Boston station WFXT and Memphis station WHBQ-TV in October 2014). The Viacom purchase also reunited KBHK with Detroit's WKBD, which had been purchased by Paramount Stations Group (which was in the process of being sold to Viacom, through that company's acquisition of Paramount) in 1993. After its purchase by Viacom was finalized, KBHK moved from its original longtime studios on California Street in the Nob Hill area and integrated its operations with KPIX at their studios on Battery Street.

On January 24, 2006, the Warner Bros. unit of Time Warner and CBS Corporation announced that the two companies would shut down The WB and UPN and combine the networks' respective programming to create a new "fifth" network called The CW.[3][4] On the day of the announcement, the network signed a ten-year affiliation deal with 11 of CBS Corporation's 15 UPN stations, including KBHK. However, it is likely that KBHK would have been chosen even without the affiliation deal. Network representatives were on record as preferring the "strongest" WB and UPN affiliates in terms of viewership, and KBHK had been well ahead of WB affiliate KBWB-TV (channel 20, now KOFY-TV) in the ratings for virtually all of UPN's run.

KBCW holds the distinction of being The CW's West Coast flagship station, even though this position is normally assigned to a Los Angeles station; CBS Corporation does not own a CW station in that market—the company owns KCAL-TV, which it runs as an independent station, while L.A.'s CW affiliate KTLA (owned by Nexstar Media Group) serves as its largest station in the West Coast (in terms of market size). With the launch of The CW, KBCW became the Bay Area's only major English-language network (and network-owned) station on the UHF dial. To reflect the new affiliation, KBHK officially changed its call letters to KBCW on July 1, 2006.

On December 4, 2019, CBS Corporation and Viacom remerged into ViacomCBS.

In addition to the CW network schedule, syndicated programming on KBCW includes The Goldbergs, The People's Court, 2 Broke Girls, Two and a Half Men and Family Feud among others. The station is considered an alternate CBS affiliate, and as such, KBCW may air CBS network programs as time permits in the event that KPIX is unable to in the event of extended breaking news coverage or special event programming, such as San Francisco 49ers preseason games; the CBS Dream Team Saturday morning children's block, for example, at one time occasionally aired on KBCW due to live CBS Sports coverage on KPIX that airs on the network in the early afternoon in the Eastern Time Zone (the Dream Team block would itself preempt The CW's One Magnificent Morning block). KBCW also used to air rebroadcasts of CBS News programs Face the Nation and CBS Sunday Morning, and local programs produced by KPIX such as Eye on the Bay and the Last Honest Sports Show.

Over the years at various times, KBHK served as the television home of Major League Baseball's Oakland Athletics, the NBA's Golden State Warriors, the now-defunct California Golden Seals NHL franchise and preseason games from the NFL's San Francisco 49ers. In 2022, the station will begin broadcasting the home games of the Oakland Panthers of the Indoor Football League.

As of September 2020, not counting an additional two and a half hour-long simulcast of that station's weekday morning news program, KPIX presently produces 6 hours of locally produced newscasts each week for KBCW (with an hour each on weekdays and a half-hour each on Saturdays and Sundays).

The station attempted to produce a nightly newscast in the 1970s, only to eventually cancel the program due to low ratings. On March 3, 2008, KPIX began producing a nightly half-hour primetime newscast at 10:00 p.m. for KBCW; this program initially competed against KTVU's longer-established and hour-long newscast, whose viewership is generally the largest among all the market's late newscasts from 10:00–11:35 p.m. The KBCW program had been produced in high definition since its debut. In July 2014, the newscast was expanded to one hour on weeknights while remaining a half-hour on weekends.

In January 2012, KPIX-TV began producing an hour-long extension of its weekend morning newscast for KBCW airing on Sundays at 8:30 a.m. but dropped it in June 2015. In early 2015, KBCW began to simulcast Good Day from Sacramento sister CW station KMAX on weekdays from 7 to 10 a.m. and weekends from 8 to 11 a.m., but cancelled it less than a year later. In July 2018, KBCW briefly carried an extension of KPIX's weekday morning newscast from 7 to 8 a.m. before cancelling it.