27 Facts About KTVU

KTVU is a television station licensed to Oakland, California, United States, broadcasting the Fox network to the San Francisco Bay Area.

KTVU's operations were inaugurated with a special live telecast from its temporary studio facility at the former Paris Theatre in downtown Oakland.

KTVU moved its transmitter facilities to the Sutro Tower after the structure was completed in 1973.

KTVU retained this status even as competing independents on the UHF band signed on during the late 1960s, most notably KBHK-TV and KEMO-TV within months of each other in early 1968.

KTVU exercised discretion and limited the number of commercial break interruptions during the movie telecasts, often airing the films uncensored and with commentary, either by a studio host or via slides.

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In 1992, KTVU ran a station-edited version of the 1984 science fiction film Dune, which combined footage from the Alan Smithee television cut with the original theatrical release .

KTVU carried programming from the Operation Prime Time programming service in 1978.

In 1977, KTVU was uplinked to satellite as a national superstation, being carried primarily on systems operated by cable television provider and corporate cousin, Cox Cable.

However, the station was unable to compete with WTBS in Atlanta, and two other independent stations that were uplinked to satellite as superstations in the two years after KTVU gained national distribution, WGN-TV in Chicago and WOR-TV in New York City, and began to scale down its national coverage via cable in 1982.

The station continued to be distributed nationally on direct broadcast satellite via C-Band systems until the late 1990s; KTVU was carried on PrimeStar as its Fox network feed for the Pacific Time Zone until the satellite provider merged with DirecTV in 1999.

Subsequently, Fox approached Cox Enterprises to affiliate with the upstart network months prior to its formal launch, with KTVU agreeing to serve as its charter affiliate for the San Francisco–Oakland–San Jose market.

Similar to other Fox stations during the network's early years, KTVU was programmed as a de facto independent station, even after Fox expanded its programming into prime time on weekend evenings in April 1987.

The strong ratings that KTVU had as an independent station carried over into its tenure with Fox, turning it into one of the network's strongest affiliates; despite having its programming occasionally being preempted by San Francisco Giants game telecasts, Fox was very satisfied with KTVU because of its ratings performance.

However, KTVU would begin to alternately brand as "Fox Channel 2" by the early 1990s, which was mainly used within promotions for Fox network programs, with the network's logo being placed to the left of KTVU's longtime "Circle Laser 2" logo .

In November 2014, KTVU transitioned from Cox's in-house digital platforms to those operated by Fox, which included the release of new mobile apps and the transition of its website to the WorldNow platform and the webpage layouts that the provider designed for the Fox-owned stations.

Since it first joined the network as an affiliate in October 1986, KTVU has generally aired the entire Fox program lineup without preemptions, as the network airs fewer hours of programming than that offered by CBS, NBC and ABC.

The only regular exception has been Fox NFL Kickoff, which KTVU has declined carriage of since the Sunday pre-game show and Fox NFL Sunday lead-in moved to Fox from Fox Sports 1 in September 2015, due to its existing commitment to carry the "official" San Francisco 49ers pregame show 49ers Pre Game Live on Sunday mornings during the NFL regular season; Kickoff thus airs at the same time on KICU.

From 1958 until the early 1970s, KTVU aired the space-themed afternoon children's program Captain Satellite, which was hosted by Bob March and was set in a fictional spaceship known as the Starfinder II.

KTVU obtained the rights to televise San Francisco Giants Major League Baseball games in 1961, three years after the team relocated to the Bay Area from New York City.

KTVU eventually began sharing the local television rights to the Giants with SportsChannel Bay Area when the regional sports network launched in July 1991.

KTVU carried games of the cross-bay rival Oakland Athletics during that team's world championship season in 1973, and airs Athletics games that are part of the Fox MLB broadcast contract.

KTVU has served as the market's primary official television broadcaster of the San Francisco 49ers since 1994, when Fox assumed the contractual rights to air games from the National Football Conference .

The May 1999 retirement of Zehnder brought changes to the newsroom; however, KTVU was ranked as the highest quality local newscast in the nation in 2000 by the Project for Excellence in Journalism under his immediate successor, Andrew Finlayson, while maintaining the top rating slot at 10:00 and throughout the noon and morning newscasts.

KTVU issued a statement the following day regretting the incident.

KTVU operates a Mobile DTV simulcast feed on subchannel 2.

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KTVU originally launched a digital subchannel on virtual channel 2.

KTVU operates a digital fill-in translator on UHF channel 26, which serves the southern part of the viewing area, including San Jose.