| Fort Smith/Fayetteville, Arkansas | |
|---|---|
| City of license | Eureka Springs, Arkansas |
| Channels | Digital: 34 (UHF) |
| Subchannels | 34.1 MeTV 34.2 KXUN-LP |
| Translators | KWFT-LP 34 Fort Smith |
| Affiliations | Retro Television Network |
| Owner | Riverside Media, LLC (sale to Local TV, LLC pending) |
| First air date | June 2000 |
| Call letters' meaning | Pharis Broadcasting Inc. (calls came from KPBI-CA, which Pharis owned while it was on KFDF-CA's license |
| Former callsigns | KWBS-TV (2000-2004) KWFT (2004-2006) KBBL-TV (2006) |
| Former channel number(s) | Analog: 34 (UHF, 2000-2009) |
| Former affiliations | Pax TV (2000-2003) Lick TV (2003-2004) The WB (2004-2006) MyNetworkTV (2006-2009) |
| Transmitter power | 1000 kW |
| Height | 224.4 m |
| Facility ID | 81593 |
KPBI is a television station in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, serving the Fayetteville market on channel 34 as an affiliate of the Retro Television Network. While the station's city of license is located in the Springfield, Missouri market, A.C. Nielsen considers this station to be part of the Fayetteville-Fort Smith market. The station is currently owned by Riverside Media, and also serves Fort Smith, Arkansas via low-powered repeater station KWFT-LP, which also broadcasts on channel 34.
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Channel 34 began operations in 2000 as KWBS-TV, which stood for WB Springfield; however, original station owner Equity Broadcasting decided to make another new station, KWBM (channel 31) the WB affiliate for Springfield, and KWBS insteed affiliated with Pax (now Ion Television). KWBS dropped the Pax affiliation in 2003 in favor of the Equity-owned Lick TV network, but one year later the station dropped the network and finally affiliated with The WB as its Fayetteville-Fort Smith affiliate; this was accompanied by a call change to KWFT (Lick TV, a short-lived network that broadcast wrestling events (it did not, however, air WWE wrestling), has since ceased operations).
After it was announced in January 2006 that The WB and UPN would close down to form The CW that September, KWFT changed its calls to KBBL-TV on July 6, 2006, but its Fort Smith repeater retained the KWFT-LP call sign, which it still uses to this day. The KBBL-TV call letters were almost certainly not inspired by the KBBL-TV of The Simpsons, even though both stations are located in a DMA with the same name as the Simpsons' fictional hometown. Equity likes to use former radio call letters from its hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas as TV call letters, and KBBL was once used by a Little Rock radio station.
Around the same time as the call change, KBBL-TV was announced as joining the Retro Television Network (then owned by Equity) after The WB ceased operations, but as a result of KPBI-CA (channel 46) losing its Fox affiliation to KFTA-TV (channel 24) and joining MyNetworkTV, channel 34 changed its call letters to KPBI on September 22, 2006 and began to carry KPBI-CA's programming schedule (KFDF-CA, the station that was originally scheduled to join MNTV, ended up becoming the RTV affiliate). As of October 30, 2011, KPBI has dropped RTV in favor of Me-TV programming.
After failing to find a buyer at a bankruptcy auction,[1] KPBI was sold to Pinnacle Media in August 2009 (after having initially been included in Silver Point Finance's acquisition on June 2 of several Equity stations[2]), with Pinnacle assuming control under a local marketing agreement on August 5.[3] Pinnacle Media officially took ownership on November 3, 2009 and was restructured into Riverside Media in August 2010 with a change in the minority (40 percent) ownership in the company.
It was announced on August 12, 2009 that KPBI would switch to RTV,[4] which had been dropped from KFDF in January after the network severed its ties with Equity.[5] The area's MyNetworkTV affiliation subsequently moved to a new digital subchannel of KFSM-TV.
On September 1, 2011, Local TV, LLC, the owners of CBS affiliate KFSM, filed papers with the Federal Communications Commission to purchase KPBI for $784,000 through a "failing station" waiver. This is necessary because the Fort Smith-Fayetteville DMA has only seven "unique" full-power television stations; though ABC affiliate KHOG-TV is a satellite of Fort Smith-based parent KHBS and the FCC considers the parent and its satellite together as one unit. That number of unique full-power stations is normally not enough to legally support a duopoly. It is unclear how the sale could affect programming on the station, though Me-TV programming could potentially be dropped as Local TV has an affiliation agreement with Me-TV competitor Antenna TV, through Local TV's broadcast management agreement with Tribune Broadcasting.[6] Channel 34 could rejoin MyNetworkTV (currently shown on KFSM-DT2). However, Local TV will change the station's call letters to KXNW.[7]
Because it was granted an original construction permit after the FCC finalized the DTV allotment plan on April 21, 1997,[8] the station did not receive a companion channel for a digital television station. Instead, at the end of the digital TV conversion period for full-service stations, KPBI would have been required to turn off its analog signal and turn on its digital signal (called a "flash-cut").
As of December 2008[update], this station is scheduled to go dark on in 2009. According to the station's DTV status report, "On December 8, 2008, the licensee's parent corporation filed a petition for bankruptcy relief under chapter 11 of the federal bankruptcy code... This station must obtain post-petition financing and court approval before digital facilities may be constructed. The station ceased analogue broadcasting on February 17, 2009, regardless of whether digital facilities are operational by that date. The station will file authority to remain silent if so required by the FCC."[9]
While the DTV Delay Act extends this deadline to June 12, 2009, Equity has applied for an extension of the digital construction permit in order to retain the broadcast license after the station goes dark.
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