KNXV-TV (channel 15) is a television station in Phoenix, Arizona, United States, affiliated with ABC. It was established in 1979 as the Phoenix area's second independent station with part-time subscription television programming from ON TV. It was originally owned by the New Television Corporation, which had attempted to set up the station for nearly five years prior to its launch. In 1985, Scripps-Howard Broadcasting, the broadcast division of the E. W. Scripps Company, acquired KNXV-TV. Channel 15 affiliated with Fox in 1986 and became the leading independent in the market, and one of Fox's strongest affiliates. In 1994, Fox announced a multi-city affiliation agreement with New World Communications which included Phoenix's then-CBS affiliate, KSAZ-TV, and mostly CBS affiliates in several other major markets. CBS expressed interest in affiliating with Scripps's ABC affiliates in other cities and Scripps used this as leverage to force ABC to move its Phoenix affiliation from market leader KTVK to KNXV-TV beginning in January 1995.
The station was in the process of organizing a local newsroom when the switch was announced and aired its first newscast on August 1, 1994; News 15 received critical acclaim in its early years but sank in ratings and quality in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The news department recovered, expanding the number of local newscasts it produced, and has since received three George Foster Peabody Awards. In 2019, Scripps acquired a second Phoenix station, KASW (channel 61), which was the CW affiliate for Phoenix. The CW affiliation briefly moved to a subchannel of KNXV-TV to allow channel 61 to air Arizona Coyotes hockey games. The two stations share studios on 44th Street on Phoenix's east side; KNXV-TV's transmitter is located atop South Mountain. Its signal is relayed across northern Arizona through a network of low-power translators.
History Independent station (1979–1986) In February 1975, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted a construction permit to New Television Corporation to build a new ultra high frequency (UHF) television station on channel 15 in Phoenix, Arizona. The company's president was Edwin Cooperstein, who had started New Jersey's WNJU-TV in the 1960s before moving to Phoenix. New Television Corporation expected to begin broadcasting within a year and intended to place a heavy emphasis on news programming, airing three 90-minute newscasts at different times between 4 p.m. and midnight. The lone legacy of this proposed format was the station's call sign, KNXV-TV, standing for "Newswatch 15" (the "XV" stood for 15 in Roman numerals). Plans were soon delayed due to the inability to secure financing in a difficult economy, and by the end of 1976, the station had not been built. In 1977, Cooperstein and his investors sold a majority of New Television Corporation to Byron Lasky's Arlington Corporation. Lasky eventually launched or purchased three other stations: WTTO in Birmingham, Alabama; WCGV-TV in Milwaukee; and WQTV in Boston.
In late 1978, plans were made to launch the station the next year. The catalyst and financial backer was Oak Industries, which would broadcast the ON TV subscription television service in evening hours while New Television would program the station during the day as a commercial independent station, airing first-run and off-network syndicated shows and children's programs. KNXV-TV began broadcasting on September 9, 1979, more than four and a half years after the construction permit was granted. One early station promotion featured the "Bluebird of Happinews", with the voice of Elroy "Buzz" Towers (who was voiced by an early station master control and videotape operator) in an invisible sky-blue helicopter taking jabs at local news on other stations.
In Phoenix, ON TV held telecast rights at various times to ASU sports, the Phoenix Suns, Phoenix Giants minor league baseball and Los Angeles Kings hockey. By July 1982, ON TV had 39,000 subscribers in Phoenix, but sporting events and subscribers were moving from subscription television to cable. In 1981, the Suns signed a 13-year agreement to telecast games through American Cable, resulting in the launch of the Arizona Sports Programming Network; American Cable sub-licensed games to ON TV, partly because they had not yet wired all of the metropolitan area. KNXV-TV was at times uncooperative with ON TV's programming plans; the station resisted a request to expand ON TV to start before 7 p.m. on weekdays and 5 p.m. on weekends, and it threatened to stop airing ON TV's "adults only" late-night fare. ON TV sued KNXV over its refusal to cede early evening hours, which generated 60 percent of the station's revenue.
Phoenix was one of the first ON TV markets to show serious subscriber erosion. By April 1983, its subscriber base had dipped below 25,000—a drop of more than 35 percent. Oak Communications ultimately shuttered ON TV in Phoenix on May 4, 1983, resulting in the loss of 140 jobs. KNXV then became a full-time general-entertainment independent station, relying on a movie library and syndicated shows not already owned by KPHO-TV (channel 5)—the established independent in Phoenix—or the network affiliates.
Scripps purchase and Fox affiliation After going full-time with the end of ON TV, potential buyers expressed interest in acquiring channel 15. Cooperstein rebuffed a $22 million (equivalent to $ in ) bid from the Tribune Company but accepted a $30 million (equivalent to $ in ) offer from Scripps-Howard in 1984; the sale was finalized in 1985 after Scripps was required by the FCC to divest itself of radio stations KMEO-AM-FM.
The new owner's connections showed in a program KNXV debuted shortly after the sale. In mid-1985, KNXV began producing Friday Night at the Frights starring "Edmus Scarey" (portrayed by Ed Muscare), a series of hosted B-movies. Muscare had previously hosted shows for another Scripps station, KSHB-TV in Kansas City. Stu Powell, general manager of KNXV in the mid-1980s and former KSHB-TV general manager, coaxed Muscare out of retirement to work in Phoenix. Muscare resigned in September 1986, shortly before being arrested on charges of sexual battery with a minor stemming from an incident in Florida. The station also became the over-the-air broadcaster of the Suns again; it lost the rights to televise the team's games to KUTP (channel 45) in 1988 with the figure increasing to 30 beginning in the 1990–91 season. KNXV beat out KPHO-TV and KUTP to become Phoenix's Fox affiliate at the network's inception on October 9, 1986; as Fox's first and only program was The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers, KNXV remained essentially independent. The station had a unique view of the development of the network, as general manager Powell sat on Fox's first board of governors; he would remark of the early days, "The only definition of failure at Fox at that time was not trying things."
During this period, KNXV made steady gains. By 1990, channel 15 had surpassed KPHO in total-day ratings, even though the station still produced no local newscasts, and it was regularly appearing as one of the top five Fox affiliates by ratings in the country. While KPHO attempted to woo Fox away with its existing news operation, KNXV retained the affiliation, having become by 1992 the second most successful Fox affiliate in ratings after KTXL in Sacramento, California.
ABC affiliate (1995–present)
On May 22, 1994, New World Communications signed a long-term groupwide affiliation agreement with Fox that would result in longtime CBS affiliate KSAZ-TV (channel 10), which New World was in the process of acquiring, becoming the Phoenix area's new Fox affiliate. The deal also affected the two other Fox stations owned by Scripps-Howard, KSHB-TV and WFTS-TV in Tampa. New World also owned CBS affiliates switching to Fox in Detroit and Cleveland. CBS was highly interested in moving to the successful Scripps-owned ABC affiliates—WXYZ-TV and WEWS-TV—in these markets, which ABC estimated to generate half a rating point by themselves for World News Tonight, per a declaration made by KTVK general manager Bill Miller in an FCC filing. Miller described a pressure campaign led by Scripps to coerce a reluctant ABC to switch from longtime affiliate and market leader KTVK by threatening disaffiliation in Detroit and Cleveland, having been told by ABC executive Bryce Rathbone that "Scripps has a gun to their head". Meanwhile, KNXV general manager Raymond Hunt was receiving calls congratulating him on KNXV's new CBS affiliation, even though no such deal had been made.
On June 15, 1994, ABC officially gave KNXV-TV its affiliation for Phoenix, effective January 9, 1995, and agreed to affiliate with Scripps-owned stations in Tampa and Baltimore. KNXV was in the advanced stages of building a local news department when the affiliation switch was announced; in September 1993, the station had hired its first news director, and the station's newly hired staff of 30 had reported to Phoenix in the weeks before the New World deal was announced. As a result of the switch and the consequent demand for more newscasts, the news staff expanded to 85, and the station delayed the launch of its newscast a month to August 1. KTVK's loss of the ABC affiliation was attributed to it being a standalone, family-run operation, while Scripps held substantial clout as a major broadcast chain.
Over the second half of 1994, ABC programming migrated from KTVK to KNXV in stages as the outgoing affiliate shed a variety of its soon-to-be former network's offerings. When KTVK launched a local morning newscast at the end of August, Good Morning America was the first ABC program to move to KNXV. KNXV then picked up World News Tonight and Nightline on December 12, the day after the Fox affiliation ended. The rest of ABC's programming moved to KNXV on January 9, 1995.
New studios and 2007 helicopter crash
In 1999, the station moved to a new $31 million studio facility that included two studios and a helipad; KDRX-LP, the low-power Telemundo affiliate, then acquired KNXV's former building in 2001, allowing it to start producing its own local newscasts; KNXV-TV had previously produced KDRX's first local news program in 1997. Scripps opted to centralize its advertising traffic operation at hubs in Phoenix and Tampa in 2009, choosing Phoenix as one of its westernmost properties at the time, allowing the traffic hub to stay open later.
On July 27, 2007, two news helicopters leased to KNXV and KTVK collided while covering a police pursuit in downtown Phoenix. All four people on both helicopters were killed, including KNXV pilot Craig Smith and photographer Rick Krolak.
KNXV-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 15, at 12:01 a.m. on June 12, 2009, the official date on which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. At 2 a.m. on that date, the station's digital signal relocated from its pre-transition UHF channel 56, which was among the high-band UHF channels (52–69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition, to its analog-era UHF channel 15.
Duopoly with KASW and CW affiliation shuffle
Scripps has since expanded its operations in Phoenix and the state. Its 2015 acquisition of Journal Communications included KGUN-TV and KWBA-TV, the ABC and CW affiliates in Tucson. On March 20, 2019, Scripps announced that it would acquire Phoenix's affiliate of The CW, KASW, and seven other stations from Nexstar Media Group as part of that company's proposed acquisition of Tribune Media. This would create a new duopoly between KNXV and KASW, the third in the Phoenix market after Fox Television Stations's KSAZ-TV/KUTP and Meredith Corporation's KPHO-TV/KTVK. The sale was approved by the FCC on September 16 and completed on September 19, 2019.