26 Facts About KPIX

KPIX-TV is a television station licensed to San Francisco, California, United States, broadcasting CBS programming to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Under its first general manager, Phil Lasky, KPIX gained an early reputation for news coverage, being noted for originating national CBS coverage of the Japanese Peace Conference of 1951, held in San Francisco, as well as local news coverage of the 1953 crash of an Australian airliner while on approach to San Francisco International Airport, and a powder explosion a few weeks afterward at an explosives plant in suburban Hercules.

KPIX originated the annual college football East-West Shrine Game for DuMont, and was the flagship station of the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League until 1954.

In May 2006, KPIX moved its San Jose news bureau to the Fairmont Tower at 50 W San Fernando Street—which served as the original site of Charles Herrold's experimental radio broadcasts that were the precursor of KCBS.

KPIX was the only CBS-owned station on the West Coast not to follow the trend of other CBS-owned stations branding themselves as "CBS " for years after the merger, simply referencing itself as "KPIX-TV Channel 5".

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In 2003, KPIX fell in line with its sister stations and rebranded as "CBS 5", and later to "CBS 5 Bay Area".

KPIX originated the concept for the entertainment and lifestyle program, Evening Magazine.

In September 1994, two months after CBS signed a long-term affiliation deal with the Westinghouse stations, KPIX began airing the entire CBS schedule without preemptions except for local news emergencies, as per the agreement between Westinghouse and CBS.

KPIX was known for the locally produced morning talk show, People are Talking, which began in 1978 with Ann Fraser and Ross MacGowan, and ran until 1991 .

On KPIX, the show preempted The Price Is Right for a few years; the game show aired instead on independent stations in the Bay Area such as KOFY-TV .

KPIX was the television home of the Golden State Warriors basketball team during the 1990s.

KPIX-TV was the exclusive home of the Bay to Breakers, before it moved to KRON.

From 1956 to 1993, KPIX carried most San Francisco 49ers games locally as part of CBS' broadcast rights to the NFL, which covered the entire pre-merger league until 1970, and the National Football Conference from 1970 to 1993.

KPIX lost the 49ers to KTVU in 1994, when the NFC package moved to Fox.

KPIX has broadcast 49ers games in the immediate Bay Area market if the team plays on ESPN's Monday Night Football or more recently on Thursday Night Football, produced by NFL Network, in partnership with CBS Sports.

KPIX had another segment called "wiggly lines, " where he would ask a child to draw a wiggly line and ask him or her what they wanted Captain Fortune to draw and he would convert the line into the drawing.

KPIX came to San Francisco in 1932 and attended the California School of Fine Arts.

For most of the last 30 years, KPIX has been a solid runner-up to KGO-TV in the Bay Area news ratings.

KPIX utilizes a doppler weather radar system called "Hi-Def Doppler" during weather segments, which is located on Mount Vaca.

One of KPIX's innovating program directors, Ray Hubbard, created The Noon News.

From 1965 to 1994 and again from 1995 to 2013, KPIX used the Eyewitness News format originally adopted by Philadelphia sister station KYW-TV.

KGO-TV uses a similar format for its newscasts, but KPIX had the Eyewitness News name first; KGO adopted its version of the format from its New York City sister station WABC-TV.

In 1966, KPIX hired the first African-American news reporters in the San Francisco television market: Ben Williams, who had been the first Black reporter for the San Francisco Examiner a few years earlier, and Belva Davis, the first female African-American reporter on the West Coast.

KPIX was home to 30 Minutes Bay Area, a half-hour news magazine produced in consultation with 60 Minutes creator Don Hewitt after he retired from the national show.

KPIX was one of the first U S television stations to provide full-time environment reporting in its newscasts—"The Greenbeat" ran from 2007 to 2010, and featured reports by Jeffrey Schaub on environmental sustainability, green technology and earth awareness issues.

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In 2007, Wendy Tokuda, returned to KPIX and brought it "Students Rising Above" feature reports that she originated during her nine-year tenure with KRON-TV to the station; Tokuda founded the "Students Rising Above" student scholarship program in 1998.