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KXII, VHF digital channel 12, is a CBS-affiliated television station located in Sherman, Texas, United States which also serves Ada and Ardmore, Oklahoma, and Denison, Texas. The station is owned by Gray Television. KXII maintains studios located on Texoma Parkway in Sherman, and its transmitter is located southwest of Madill, Oklahoma. The station's signal is relayed on low-power translator station KXIP-LD (channel 12) in Paris, Texas. Syndicated programming on KXII includes Katie, CSI: Miami, Criminal Minds, Ellen, Live! With Kelly and Michael and Two and a Half Men.

History

The station first signed on the air on August 12, 1956 as KVSO-TV, originally licensed to Ardmore, Oklahoma. The station's original owners also owned local radio station KVSO and the The Daily Ardmoreite newspaper. Channel 12 originally operated as 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 being broadcast. The station often carried some of WKY's non-network programming as well. In late 1958, the station was sold to Texoma Broadcasting and its call letters were changed to KXII (signifying the Roman numeral for 12).

In 1959, a tornado collapsed the station's transmission tower – located north of Ardmore in the Arbuckle Mountains at a site formerly used to transmit KVSO-FM – sparing the life of transmitter engineer Chester Rollins. A new transmitter and tower was later constructed near Madill, about 25 miles (40 km) southeast of Ardmore in order to provide better reception to viewers in Durant and across the Red River to the Sherman/Denison, Texas area. Beginning in 1960, the station became a primary NBC affiliate, and added a secondary affiliation with CBS. 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 was fed to cable subscribers in the Texoma area 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, Ada-based KTEN (channel 10) was a primary ABC affiliate, but also carried NBC programming through a secondary affiliation. Though KXII and KTEN were considered direct competitors, both stations had considerable differences in fringe signal coverage for many years due to the 75-mile (121 km) distances between the two stations' 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 on the southern fringe of KTEN's broadcast signal, 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 signal coverage, 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, 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 of the network's daytime shows, many prime-time programs and most of its 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 primary source of network programming from NBC to CBS in the mid-1970s, KTEN added a larger proportion of NBC programs to its daytime and primetime schedule, becoming a similar hybrid ABC and NBC station in the process. In 1977, channel 12 shifted its primary network affiliation to CBS and became an exclusive affiliate of 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 its primary affiliation to NBC, eventually becoming that station's exclusive affiliation in 1998. 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.

Digital television

Digital channels

The station's digital channel is multiplexed:

KXII operates two network-affiliated digital subchannels: KXII-DT 12.2 launched in July 2006, carrying programming from UPN (and branded as "UPN Texoma"). This programming switched to its affiliation to MyNetworkTV when UPN ceased operations on September 15 (the latter network, as well as The WB, were shut down and replaced by The CW – whose affiliation went to KTEN for its second digital subchannel). It has also added programming from Fox on its third digital subchannel, which also signed on in 2006.

Analog-to-digital conversion

KXII discontinued regular programming on its analog signal, over VHF channel 12, on February 6, 2009. The station's digital signal relocated from its pre-transition UHF channel 20 to VHF channel 12 for post-transition operations.

News operation

KXII presently broadcasts 22 hours of locally produced newscasts each week (with four hours on weekdays and one hour each on Saturdays and Sundays); in addition, KXII produces the public affairs program News 12 Forum, which airs on Sunday mornings at 6 a.m. KXII maintains a Doppler weather radar located in Madill, Oklahoma, and also utilizes radar data from National Weather Service radars located near Dallas and Wichita Falls, Texas, Oklahoma City and Fort Smith, Arkansas.

KXII's news department began with the station's 1956 sign-on, originally based from the station's original Ardmore studios. In 1960, the station opened new facilities along U.S. Highway 75, halfway between Sherman and Denison, which later became the station's main studios. In 1977, KXII relocated its Ardmore facility from Lincoln Center on West Main Street, and opened a new bureau on South Commerce Street in Ardmore; this location is still in use today in conjunction with the Sherman/Denison facility. As a dual NBC and CBS affiliate in 1974, the station switched its network evening newscast from NBC Nightly News to the CBS Evening News in the 5:30 p.m. timeslot, followed by its 6 p.m. local newscast. In September 2006, KXII debuted an all-new set for its newscasts (as well as a new graphics package) which replaced the previous set that had been in use since 1995.

The station debuted its weekday morning newscast, First News AM in 2001 as an hour-long broadcast from 6 to 7 a.m., the program was expanded to 90 minutes (at 5:30 a.m.) in 2006 and an extra five minutes was added to the program two years later following the retirement of anchor Norman Bennett; the morning newscast was rebranded as News 12 AM in 2013, and now airs weekdays from 5-7 a.m. On April 20, 2010, KXII became the first television station in the Ada-Sherman market (and the third station in Oklahoma, behind KFOR-TV in Oklahoma City and KJRH-TV in Tulsa) to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition. Both the Sherman and Ardmore studios have been equipped with high definition cameras and broadcast equipment. On April 29, 2013, KXII began producing an hour-long weekday morning newscast at 7 a.m., titled News 12 Good Day, which competes with CBS This Morning on the station's main channel.

References

1. RabbitEars TV Query for KXII
2. "DTV Tentative Channel Designations for the First and Second Rounds" (PDF). Retrieved 2012-03-24.
3. http://www.kxii.com/home/headlines/39180352.html
4. News 12 Good Day starts Monday on FOX 12, KXII, April 26, 2013.

External links

• Official website
• KXII-DT2 website
• KXII-DT3 website
• Template:TVQ
• Template:BIA

• CBS affiliates
• CBS network affiliates
• Channel 12 digital TV stations in the United States
• Television channels and stations established in 1956
• Television stations in Texas
• Channel 12 virtual TV stations in the United States
• Gray Television