20 Facts About KATV

KATV is a television station in Little Rock, Arkansas, United States, affiliated with ABC and owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group.

KATV is Little Rock's oldest continually operating television station, beating NBC affiliate KARK-TV by almost five months.

Less than a year after its debut, KATV moved its operations from Pine Bluff to studio facilities located on North Beech Street, near Kavanaugh in the Pulaski Heights section of Little Rock that were formerly occupied by KRTV, a failed UHF station that had been the first television station to sign on in the state of Arkansas.

KATV subsequently moved to a two-story building at 310 West 3rd Street; the first floor had been occupied by a furniture store, while the second floor served as studio facilities for a local radio station and housed the offices of an insurance agency.

Under Doubleday, KATV became a major competitor in the Little Rock market.

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Fact that KATV now operated out of Little Rock instead of city of license Pine Bluff led to a major fight in federal court with the Federal Communications Commission and Pine Bluff area citizens, the station lost; until recently, KATV had maintained a major presence in Jefferson County.

KATV originally transmitted its signal from a tower near Jefferson, until a taller tower was built farther north in Redfield in 1965.

KATV has used the Circle 7 logo since 1965, a logo that had traditionally been associated at the time with ABC owned-and-operated stations, and was one of the network's first affiliates to have used the logo .

KATV first placed the Circle 7 inside a square in the 1990s; WJLA now uses this version as well, though neither station uses it consistently .

In February 1999, KATV aired commercials for the Walt Disney Pictures animated film Doug's 1st Movie during an ABC network broadcast of Disney's Doug.

KATV appealed the fine, claiming the error was due to a last-minute insertion order from ABC.

KATV eventually received FCC approval to build a new tower on Shinall Mountain, where Little Rock's other major network affiliates are located.

KATV began transmitting its digital signal from the new facility located on Shinall Mountain on February 1,2009.

In 2009, KATV donated approximately 300 hours of film and 26,000 hours of video tape to the University of Arkansas David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History.

On February 20,2019, KATV announced that it would relocate to a renovated facility in the city's Riverdale district in a building Sinclair purchased for $4.

KATV originally planned to move to the Riverdale facility in early 2020; however, the relocation was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

KATV is currently one of only two television stations in the Little Rock market that carries a newscast on weekend mornings, the station has produced a Saturday edition of Channel 7 News Daybreak since 1992; KATV does not currently air news programming on Sunday mornings.

KATV was one of a few television stations affiliated with a network other than NBC to participate in a news share agreement with a Pax TV station.

KATV shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 7, on June 12,2009, the official date in which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate.

KATV was carried on cable systems in those areas, including Greenville, Cleveland, Clarksdale, Drew and Harrison.