Ада және Шерман аймағының KTEN телеарнасының тарихы

NBC/CW/ABC affiliate in Ada, Oklahoma

KTEN (channel 10) is a television station licensed to Ada, Oklahoma, United States, serving the Sherman, Texas–Ada, Oklahoma market as an affiliate of NBC, The CW Plus, and ABC. The station is owned by Lockwood Broadcast Group, and maintains primary studios on High Point Circle (near Katy Memorial Expressway/US 75) in northwestern Denison, Texas, with secondary studios at the Ardmore Energy Center on Merrick Drive (near North Commerce Street) in northwestern Ardmore. Its transmitter is located along State Highway 7 in rural northeastern Johnston County, Oklahoma (west of Wapanucka and southwest of Bromide).

KTEN's history traces back to 1952, when Eastern Oklahoma Television Inc.—a locally based company owned by Bill Hoover, C. C. Morris and Brown Morris, who also owned radio stations KADA (1230 AM) in Ada and KWSH (1260 AM) in Wewoka through their Oklahoma Broadcasting Company subsidiary—applied with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a license to operate a television station on VHF channel 12 (the 1952 assignment of the frequency to the Sherman–Ada media market under the Sixth Report and Order consequently resulted in the FCC also moving the channel 12 allocation originally assigned to Waco, Texas westward to Abilene—where it would become occupied by present day ABC affiliate KTXS TV—to avoid interference with any Sherman–Ada station that would be assigned to that channel). Hoover's firm purchased a plot of land located 10 mile (16 km) north of Ada with the intention to build a studio and transmitter facility for the station, for which it originally filed to use KEO as its call letters. Shortly after the FCC granted the license application to the Hoover group (now given the call letters KEOK) in 1953, Eastern Oklahoma Television reached an agreement with the FCC to assign its proposed station to VHF channel 10, a second television frequency allocated to the Sherman–Ada market under the Report and Order memorandum; the group subsequently applied to use KTEN as its call sign, becoming the first applicant to incorporate their station's channel number into its call letters in an FCC license filing. The station first signed on the air on June 1, 1954, as the first television station to sign on in the Ada–Sherman market, Prior to the sign on of KTEN, Texoma area residents were only available to receive over the air television service via stations based in the adjacent Oklahoma City, Dallas–Fort Worth and Wichita Falls–Lawton markets; even still, these stations only provided Grade B coverage at best in the northern and western counties of south central Oklahoma and in parts of north central Texas; reception of these fringe stations requiring a strong outdoor antenna in Ardmore, Tishomingo and Sulphur, Oklahoma, Gainesville and Denison, Texas, and surrounding areas. Among KTEN's earliest personalities was Churches of Christ televangelist Mack Lyon, who began his television career with channel 10 as a producer and speaker for a religious program which aired on the station. It was the first regularly scheduled television program produced by the ministry. From the fall of 1980 until 1982, during the tail end of his tenure as the church's pastor, Lyon hosted a weekly ministry program by the Wewoka Church of Christ that also aired locally on KTEN. Lyon would become known among national audiences after he started In Search of the Lord's Way, a syndicated weekly program that he developed as a television outreach of the Edmond Church of Christ in 1982, which Lyon hosted until 2010, when he retired and Phil Sanders replaced him as host; in addition to its carriage on local commercial and independent religious television stations throughout North America, Search also aired nationally on the now defunct American Christian Television System (ACTS) during the early and mid 1990s. Channel 10 would eventually gain a competitor when a consortium led by Maurine Easley and Albert Riesen, the daughter and son in law of John Easley, longtime owner of The Ardmoreite and radio station KVSO (1240 AM), signed on KVSO TV (channel 12, now KXII) in Ardmore on August 12, 1956; KVSO assumed the local rights to NBC programming from KTEN, and also served as a secondary CBS affiliate. On June 1, 1964, Eastern Oklahoma Television commenced construction on a new studio and production facility for KTEN on 1600 Arlington Street in Ada. When the studio opened the following year, it was dedicated in an opening ceremony by actor Clint Walker (then the star of the ABC western series Cheyenne) and television and radio journalist Paul Harvey. KTEN would eventually gain a third radio sister in 1967, when Hoover's Oklahoma Broadcasting group signed on KEOR (1000 AM) in Atoka. As a condition of approval, the Johnson led group stated that it would open a secondary studio facility for KTEN on Merrick Drive (near North Commerce Street) in Ardmore, which opened in October 1985. In January 1986, KTEN opened a tertiary studio facility in the Katy Depot in downtown Denison, which originally housed a news bureau and certain back office operations; the Ada facility would remain in operation as the base of channel 10's news operations, and its programming, master control and advertising sales departments. In May 1993, KTEN adopted a 24 hour a day programming schedule, initially filling overnight time periods following the NBC late night lineup with a mix of syndicated programs and movies. By this time, KTEN was gravitating toward becoming a primary NBC affiliate, but continued to carry a large proportion of ABC's schedule; the station even incorporated localized versions of promotional image campaigns produced by both networks. (The station later began clearing ABC's overnight newscast, World News Now, in the time period originally occupied by the overnight film showcases in July 1994.) Although KTEN's programming schedule appeared to be transitioning its network allegiance exclusively to NBC by the early to mid 1990s, another network move was made along the way.

In July 1994, KTEN began maintaining a second primary affiliation with the Fox Broadcasting Company, a move it made (on May 24 of that year) in part to regain some financial footing by way of the monetary compensation that the station would be given by Fox. Because the Sherman–Ada market did not have enough commercial television stations to sustain an exclusive affiliation, Texoma area residents could only watch Fox network programming via the network's cable feed, Foxnet, or through out of market affiliates—KOKH TV in Oklahoma City, KJTL in Wichita Falls or Fox owned and operated station KDAF [now a CW affiliate] in Dallas–Fort Worth—that provided a Grade B over the air signal in certain areas or were available on local cable providers. Another major incentive was that, through both NBC (which then held the broadcast television rights to the American Football Conference [AFC]) and Fox (which was awarded the contractual rights to the National Football Conference (NFC) television package in a $1.58 billion bid on December 18, 1993), KTEN would uniquely be able to show every single Dallas Cowboys game that the National Football League (NFL) permitted to air on its broadcast television rightsholders; the Cowboys had most of their games carried locally by KXII from 1962 until CBS lost the rights to the NFC package in 1993. For most of its history under the group's ownership, KTEN was the only television station owned by Lockwood that was affiliated with one of the Big Four television networks; this status lasted until 2015, when Lockwood purchased ABC affiliate KAKE TV in Wichita, Kansas and its satellites from Gray Television on October 1 of that year (as part of a $11.2 million trade deal involving Lockwood owned independent station WBXX TV in Knoxville, Tennessee). With the station becoming more financially stable under Lockwood, KTEN disaffiliated from ABC and Fox in September of that year, resulting in the station exclusively aligning with NBC; at that point, it began carrying the vast majority of the network's programming schedule, although it continued to preempt the network's daytime talk programs until the end of the decade, although it delayed that block to the early morning by that time. The disaffiliation from ABC had left the Sherman–Ada market as one of several markets in the United States ranked below #80 by Nielsen Media Research that had affiliations with only two of the Big Four television networks. The network's absence was made more apparent by the time that KTEN and KXII respectively launched digital subchannels affiliated with The CW, Fox and MyNetworkTV in 2006, as the two stations had maintained affiliations with five of the six major broadcast networks (NBC, CBS, Fox, The CW and MyNetworkTV); KTEN would eventually reunite with ABC in May 2010, when the station converted its DT3 subchannel into an affiliate of the network. On August 1, 2002, the station began construction on a new studio at 10 Highpoint Circle (near U. S. Route 75) in Denison, Texas to house the station's newsroom and production studios as well as its management offices, and engineering and master control departments (the Ada facility would continue to house advertising sales offices after the new facility was completed); KTEN migrated its primary studio operations from the Katy Depot to the Highpoint Circle building on November 18, 2002. Repairs to and replacement of the damaged production equipment were completed by April 1, at which point the station resumed over the air transmissions of all three channels at full power.

KTEN DT3, branded alternatingly as ABC Texoma and as ABC 10, is the ABC affiliated third digital subchannel of KTEN, broadcasting in high definition on channel 10.3. KTEN launched a tertiary digital subchannel on virtual channel 10.3 on September 18, 2006, which originally operated as a 24 hour simulcast of the station's Doppler radar system (then branded as "SkyAlert 10 TrueView Doppler 10/4"), which was accompanied by an audio simulcast of Ardmore based NOAA Weather Radio station KXI57. Other programming carried on the subchannel during this period included a limited amount of paid programming, educational programs that it aired on Saturday mornings to fulfill Children's Television Act requirements, and occasional sports telecasts from Raycom Sports' SEC Network. On April 4, 2010, Lockwood Broadcast Group reached a long term agreement with the Disney ABC Television Group to provide ABC network programming over its DT3 subchannel over KTEN DT3, a transaction that would mark the return of an in market ABC station in Ada–Sherman after a twelve year absence. After KTEN terminated its affiliation contract with ABC in September 1998, because the market did not have enough commercial television stations to support exclusive affiliations with all four major broadcast networks, viewers in the Ada–Sherman television market were only able to receive ABC programming through local cable providers, by way of out of market affiliates such as WFAA in Dallas–Fort Worth and KOCO TV in Oklahoma City (the ABC station that was available on the local cable provider varied depending on the subscriber's geographic location within the market: WFAA, which maintains marginal to absent over the air coverage, even with amplified outdoor antennas, north of a line from Muenster to Whitewright, Texas, was mainly carried in far south central Oklahoma and north central Texas from Ardmore southward, while KOCO was carried in most of south central Oklahoma's northernmost counties from Ada southward to Ardmore). Lockwood helped finance the infrastructure needed for KTEN's ABC subchannel (including costs to construct an extension to the High Point Circle facility that would house a secondary studio for KTEN DT3's newscasts) through a grant from the Denison Development Alliance, a local chamber organization that advocates for business development in the Denison area, along with investments made by Lockwood management. KTEN DT3 converted into an ABC affiliate at 5 a. m. on May 9, 2010. With the conversion into a major network affiliate, the subchannel—which became branded as "ABC Texoma"

KTEN clears the entire NBC network schedule, albeit with some of the network's programs airing out of pattern. The station airs NBC News Daily "live" from the network feed at noon (most NBC stations carry the programs one to two hours later). It also delays NBC's weekday overnight lineup by one hour, opting instead to air syndicated programming in the hour after Last Call with Carson Daly, while the overnight block's weekend schedule is delayed by between 2 1/2 and three hours depending on the night for the same reason. KTEN DT2 carries the entire CW network schedule, although it preempts a half hour of syndicated programming carried by the CW Plus source feed (usually consisting of off network sitcoms) each night in order to carry a 9 p. m. newscast produced by its parent station. KTEN DT3 clears the entire ABC network schedule, although it airs the Weekend Adventure block and This Week one hour earlier than their respective recommended time slots on both Saturdays and Sundays (transmitting them live under the network's Eastern Time Zone scheduling for both the Saturday morning E/I block and Sunday morning talk show).

Since 1994, when the station acquired a part time affiliation with Fox, KTEN has served as the official television partner of the Dallas Cowboys. By way of the team's television production unit, channel 10 holds local broadcast rights to various team related programs that air during the regular season (including the Cowboys Postgame Show, Special Edition with Jerry Jones and the head coach's weekly analysis program The Jason Garrett Show, along with specials such as the Making of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders Calendar and postseason team reviews) as well as preseason games that are not televised nationally on broadcast or cable television. The rights to most of the team produced broadcasts, particularly pertaining to Cowboys preseason games, would migrate to KTEN DT3 in September 2010. KTEN also carries certain regular season games in which the Cowboys are a participant over its main channel via NBC's contractual rights to the Sunday Night Football package, consisting of both games involving the team's NFC opponents and interconference games against teams in the American Football Conference. Most regular season Cowboys game telecasts air on KXII DT3, through Fox's broadcast rights to the National Football Conference, with some interconference games involving AFC opponents airing on KXII's main channel through CBS' contractual rights to the NFL.

as of September 2016, KTEN presently broadcasts 27 hours of locally produced newscasts each week for its main channel (with five hours each weekday and one hour each on Saturdays and Sundays). In addition, the station produces 3½ hours of locally produced newscasts each week for KTEN DT2 (with a half hour each on weekdays, Saturdays and Sundays), and 17 hours of newscasts each week for KTEN DT3 (with three hours on weekdays and one hour each on Saturdays and Sundays). KTEN DT3 also airs live newscasts normally seen on channel 10.1 in the event that a sporting event or other special programming delays newscasts seen on the main channel; the newscasts will then also be recorded to be rebroadcast on KTEN after the event. Channel 10 may also simulcast long form severe weather coverage on KTEN DT3 in the event that a tornado warning is issued for any county in its viewing area of south central Oklahoma and far north central Texas. The station does not produce weather inserts – live or pre recorded – during the weekend editions of NBC's Today, instead running the program's placeholder national weather map and ancillary story segments during the time normally allocated by the program for affiliates to air local news and weather inserts. During the 1970s, KTEN acquired a remote newsgathering unit to provide coverage of news events throughout the viewing area. In the mid 1980s, KTEN took advantage of newly implemented FCC rules that permitted translator stations to provide localized content for their individual area of service. In 1985, the station opened a small studio facility and news bureau for its translator K08KK in Paris, Texas, from which KTEN began producing a brief news and weather segment that would air on the repeater during channel 10's 10 p. m. newscast. This insert was discontinued by the station in the late 1980s due to a lack of advertiser support. At the time the station opened the Merrick Drive facility in Ardmore in 1985, KTEN used the facility primarily to operate a bureau to gather news content for Carter County and surrounding areas on the Oklahoma side of the market; the station hired two full time reporters and photographers from the Ardmore Energy Center (KTEN also maintains a satellite sales office within the building). Prior to becoming the station's main studio complex by the early 1990s, the Katy Depot facility in Denison initially also served as a bureau for Grayson County and surrounding areas of north central Texas, also maintaining two reporters and a photographer as well as a satellite sales office. In November 2005, KTEN began utilizing "TrueView Doppler 10/4" (later renamed "First Alert True View Radar" in 2012), a Doppler radar system that utilizes live VIPIR data from radars operated by National Weather Service radar sites out of Oklahoma City and Frederick, Oklahoma, Fort Worth, Texas and Shreveport, Louisiana for use by station meteorologists for weather segments within its newscasts and for severe weather cut ins (KTEN does not operate a radar site within proximity to its studios). The radar utilizes a radar beam wavelength that, because each of the sites used provides overlapping coverage of the station's viewing area, is less prone to attenuation interference from precipitation located near each of the sites in comparison to shorter wavelength radars. One month after the subchannel launched as a CW affiliate, on October 25, 2006, KTEN began producing a half hour prime time newscast at 9 p. m. for KTEN DT2, under the title Texoma CW News at 9:00. The program—which was the first local prime time news program to debut in the Ada–Sherman market – uses the same anchor staff as that employed for the evening newscasts on KTEN's main channel. Texoma CW News at 9:00 would eventually gain a competitor in September 2009, when CBS affiliate KXII began producing a five minute long news and weather segment in that timeslot for its Fox affiliated DT3 subchannel (which originally aired only on Monday through Friday evenings, before expanding into a half hour, seven night a week broadcast on August 26, 2011). On July 30, 2008, the station introduced "KTEN Weather Call," a subscription telephone notification service that utilizes the National Weather Service's Storm Based Warnings to send an automated warning message recorded by KTEN meteorologists—and, if a user prefers to receive it, an email or text message—to the user's address if their location within the warning area. The station launched additional newscasts for KTEN DT3 upon its May 9, 2010, conversion into an ABC affiliate. Initially, the subchannel carried simulcasts of the final 90 minutes of its weekday morning newscast and its nightly 5 p. m. newscasts, along with separate weekday late afternoon and nightly 10 p. m. newscasts produced for KTEN DT3, under the brand ABC Texoma News (later retitled ABC 10 First News in September 2015); KTEN extended production of the "ABC Texoma" newscasts to include the weekday morning and weekend 5:30 p. m. newscasts. The "ABC Texoma" newscasts are produced from a secondary news set at KTEN's High Point Circle studios, and incorporates national news segments from the ABC News One affiliate video service along with content from CNN Newsource incorporated into newscasts seen on the station's NBC and CW channels. Weekend evening newscasts seen on KTEN DT1 and KTEN DT3 can be delayed or preempted on either or both channels in the event that network programming (most commonly, sporting events like ABC Saturday Night Football games that air on KTEN DT3 during the college football season) overrun into their timeslots. In September 2011, KTEN extended its 5 p. m. newscast to Saturday and Sunday evenings; until that time, weekend news programming on KTEN's main channel was limited to the existing 10 p. m. broadcast. On September 12, 2011, KTEN launched an hour long newscast at 4 p. m. for KTEN DT3 (the program was originally slated to air on the station's main signal, before being moved to the ABC subchannel shortly before its debut). On January 30, 2014, KTEN began broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition, becoming the second and last television station in the Ada Sherman market to make the upgrade; the 9 p. m. newscast on KTEN DT2 was not included in the upgrade as the subchannel transmitted in standard definition at the time. With the upgrade, the station also introduced a high definition ready set that was originally used by fellow NBC station KXAS TV in Dallas–Fort Worth from 2010 until that station relocated from its longtime Broadcast Hill facility in Fort Worth to the then new Studios at DFW in October 2013.

KTEN began low power test transmissions of its digital television signal in 2002. The station commenced full power digital broadcasts on a regular basis on July 1, 2006, at which point the station began broadcasting its main feed in high definition over UHF digital channel 26; initially, the only HD programming content offered by KTEN consisted of NBC network programs. Final upgrades to the full power signal were completed that summer, in preparation for the September launch of its CW affiliated DT2 subchannel. The station's digital signal remained on its pre transition UHF channel 26, using PSIP to display KTEN's virtual channel as its former VHF analog channel 10 on digital television receivers. The decision to delay KTEN's digital conversion was made to enable viewers that were not prepared for the transition to continue receiving information about severe thunderstorm events affecting the Texoma area during the spring 2009 severe weather season, most notably on February 10, 2009, when the station provided extensive live coverage of an EF4 tornado that killed eight people in Lone Grove.