KCLO-TV
KCLO-TV (channel 15) is a television station in Rapid City, South Dakota, United States, affiliated with CBS and The CW Plus. Owned by Nexstar Media Group, the station maintains a news bureau and advertising sales office on Canyon Lake Drive in Rapid City, and its transmitter is located on Skyline Drive near downtown. Although identifying as a separate station in its own right, KCLO-TV is considered a semi-satellite of sister station KELO-TV (channel 11) in Sioux Falls, which operates two other semi-satellites: KDLO-TV (channel 3) in Florence and KPLO-TV (channel 6 ) in Reliance. KCLO-TV's master control, as well as most internal operations, are housed at KELO-TV's studios on Phillips Avenue in downtown Sioux Falls. KCLO-TV clears all network programming as provided through its parent and simulcasts KELO-TV's newscasts (with local weather inserts), but airs a separate offering of syndicated programming; there are also separate commercial inserts and legal station identifications. As Rapid City is located in the Mountain Time Zone, KCLO-TV's prime time schedule starts at 6 p.m. rather than the usual 7 p.m. start for the rest of Mountain Time, or  in Central Time, where KCLO-TV's sister stations are located. While KCLO-TV initially carried network programs on an hour delay from KELO-TV when it became a full-power station, it began airing them—and KELO's Sioux Falls-based news—live in January 1991 during the Gulf War and announced it would do so permanently. It is also one of three CBS affiliates in the United States to air their prime time schedule before or after the national schedule starts in its official time: KOVR in Sacramento, like KCLO-TV, also starts its prime time schedule an  hour earlier at 7 p.m. in the Pacific Time Zone instead of the customary 8 p.m. start, while KUAM-DT2 in Guam starts its schedule at 8 p.m. in order to avoid competing with its primary NBC subchannel's 7 p.m. schedule. History. In 1980, Midcontinent Media filed to build a translator for KELO-TV on channel 15 in Rapid City, where at the time select CBS programming was seen on the market's ABC and NBC affiliates, KOTA-TV and KEVN; the two stations carried up to six hours each of CBS programming each week. Over protests from the  two stations, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the application in November. K15AC began broadcasting September 26, 1981; it brought the full CBS network schedule to viewers without cable in Rapid City and displaced Denver's KMGH-TV from Rapid City cable. The translator received the signal of KPLO-TV at Reliance and beamed it through three microwave sites to Rapid City. Two years after K15AC began operating, Midcontinent applied for a new full-power TV station license, which was granted in January 1987 and took the call letters KBLO-TV that May. KBLO-TV was planned for local program  origination, unlike KDLO or KPLO. (The call sign was changed to KCLO-TV in May 1988.) A total of $1.7 million was invested by Midcontinent to convert the Rapid City operation to a full-service station. Upon signing on as a full-power station on November 28, 1988, KCLO-TV aired KELO-TV's news programs delayed an hour, with five-minute local cut-ins at 6 p.m. and 10 p.m.; the cut-in was discontinued in January 1991 when KCLO-TV began airing KELO-TV and network programming live, as had been done in Rapid City between 1981  and 1988. In 1995, Midcontinent Media sold KCLO-TV to Young Broadcasting; the sale was approved by the FCC on May 31, 1996. On June 6, 2013, Young Broadcasting announced that it would merge with Media General. The merger was approved on November 8, after Media General shareholders approved the merger a day earlier; it was completed on November 12. On January 27, 2016, Nexstar Broadcasting Group announced that it had reached an agreement to acquire Media General, including KCLO-TV, with the sale being completed on January 17, 2017. Subchannels. The station's digital signal is multiplexed: KCLO-TV 's digital configuration has The CW Plus on channel 15.2, Ion Television on 15.3 and Ion Mystery on 15.4. By 2019, "The Black Hills' CW" had been airing in 720p HD over-the-air, per additional distribution of digital bandwidth into channel 15.2 and further compression of the remaining three subchannels of KCLO-TV. MyUTV, which is carried on the second digital subchannels of KELO-TV, KDLO-TV and KPLO-TV, is not seen in the Rapid City market on KCLO-TV. The UPN affiliate for Rapid City was KCPL-LP (channel 52), and the MyNetworkTV affiliate is KWBH-LD  which is simulcast over KNBN-DT2 (channel 21.2; formerly KKRA-LP, channel 24); as a result, MyUTV still cannot be carried on KCLO-TV by FCC market rules.