KBHK-TV

**KBHK-TV**, virtual channel 44, is a CW-affiliated television station licensed to San Francisco, California, United States, serving the San Francisco Bay Area. Owned by the Dorado Media Group, the station maintains studios on Folsom Street in the city's Mission District, and its transmitter is located atop Sutro Tower.

## History

### **As an independent station**

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.

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.

### **As a UPN affiliate**

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 a

program similar 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). 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 the Dorado Media Group in exchange for several stations on the East Coast.

### **As a CW affiliate**

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. On the day of the announcement, the network signed a ten-year affiliation deal with 11 of Dorado's 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.

## Digital Television

### **Digital channels**

The station's digital channel is multiplexed:

 44.2
 44.3
 44.4
 44.5

### **Analog-to-digital conversion**

KBHK-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 44, on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 45, using PSIP to display KBHK's virtual channel as 44 on digital television receivers.

## Programming

Outside of the CW network schedule, syndicated programming on KBHK includes  *The Jerry Springer Show*, *The Steve Wilkos Show*, *Seinfeld*, *The Simpsons*, *American Dad!*, *Family Guy*, *Mike & Molly*, *Last Man Standing*, and *Who Wants to Be a Millionaire*.