KXII (channel 12) is a television station licensed to Sherman, Texas, United States, serving the Sherman, Texas–Ada, Oklahoma market as an affiliate of CBS, MyNetworkTV, and Fox. It is owned by Gray Media alongside low-power Telemundo affiliate KAQI-LD (channel 28). The two stations share studios on Texoma Parkway (SH 91) in northeastern Sherman, with an additional studio on South Commerce Street (US 77) and Elks Boulevard in southwestern Ardmore, Oklahoma. KXII's transmitter is located along US 377 in rural northeastern Marshall County, Oklahoma (southwest of Madill).
KXII's signal is relayed on low-power translator station KXIP-LD (channel 12) in Paris, Texas (in the Dallas–Fort Worth television market), and also on the second and third subchannels of KAQI-LD.
History Early history under Reisen-Easley ownership The station first signed on the air as KVSO-TV, on August 12, 1956. Originally licensed to Ardmore, Oklahoma, it was founded by a family-led consortium led by Albert Riesen, Maurine Easley and their children, John and Buddy Riesen, and Betty Dillard. The Riesen-Easley family had assumed ownership of The Daily Ardmoreite and KVSO (1240 AM) from Maurine's father, John Easley—longtime owner of the newspaper/radio station combination, who had acquired the Ardmoreite in 1917—following his retirement the year prior.
After the family filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for the construction permit in 1954, the Reisen-Easleys obtained VHF channel 12 for their proposed television station after negotiating with Eastern Oklahoma Television, Inc., owner of Ada-based competitor KTEN (channel 10), for the allocation (the FCC had reassigned the channel 12 allocation to the Sherman–Ada market following the issuance of the Sixth Report and Order in 1952, in which the agency moved the same assignment from Waco to Abilene, Texas, where it would become occupied by present-day ABC affiliate KTXS-TV, to avoid interference with the Sherman-Ada frequency).
Channel 12 originally operated as an NBC affiliate; however the Riesen-Easley ownership group was unable to afford the expenditures to acquire a feed to access NBC's television programming directly; this forced station engineers to have to switch to and from the broadcast signal of NBC affiliate WKY-TV (now KFOR-TV) in Oklahoma City, whenever WKY aired programming from the network. In addition, KVSO-TV carried some of WKY's local and syndicated programming intermittently within its broadcast day. The station originally maintained transmitter facilities from a tower located north of Ardmore in the Arbuckle Mountains, on a site that also formerly housed the transmitter of KVSO-FM.
On April 2, 1957, the station's transmission tower was felled by a strong tornado (later retroactively rated as an F2) that touched down west of Dougherty and hit portions of northern Carter County, Oklahoma. Transmitter engineer Chester Rollins was near the tower at the time the tornado hit and escaped serious injury, despite the transmission building he was in losing its roof. The tower fell onto a pickup truck, which was shifted , killing the male driver. The station set up temporary transmission facilities near its Ardmore studio, where its signal originated until the following year, when a new transmitter and tower was constructed near Madill (about southeast of Ardmore), in order to provide better reception to viewers in Durant and across the Red River to the Sherman–Denison, Texas area.
Texoma Broadcasting ownership In late 1958, the Riesen family sold KVSO-TV to Texoma Broadcasting, a holding company owned by businessman Milford N. "Buddy" Bostick, who founded fellow CBS affiliate KWTX-TV in Waco, Texas three years earlier (The Daily Ardmoreite remained under the Riesens' ownership until 1983, when they sold the newspaper to Stauffer Communications). Shortly after the sale's closure, the station changed its call letters to KXII (signifying the Roman numeral for 12).
In the spring of 1960, channel 12 began maintaining a secondary affiliation with CBS. At that time, in addition to carrying the majority of NBC's programming lineup, CBS fare cleared to air on KVSO for most of the 1960s consisted mainly of daytime programs and sporting events (such as National Football League [NFL] game telecasts, including those involving the Dallas Cowboys). In 1960, the station opened a secondary studio facility located along U.S. Highway 75, halfway between Sherman and Denison (the building would later become the station's main studios in 1974). During the 1960s and early 1970s, most CBS programming was fed to cable subscribers in the Texoma area via the network's affiliates in surrounding markets, including KWTV in Oklahoma City, KAUZ-TV in Wichita Falls, and KRLD-TV (now Fox owned-and-operated station KDFW) in Dallas–Fort Worth. KXII's direct competitor, KTEN, was a primary ABC affiliate at the time but also carried select programming from NBC (mainly running programs that KXII did not give clearance to air) through a secondary affiliation.
Although KXII and KTEN were considered to be direct competitors, for many years, the coverage patterns of their respective signals differed considerably because of the distances between channel 12's transmitter in Madill and KTEN's transmission tower in Ada. As a result, viewers living in and surrounding areas of south-central Oklahoma located within a radius of the KXII transmitter (including the cities of Ardmore, Madill and Durant) experienced fair to poor reception of KTEN. In turn, channel 10 had marginal if not non-existent coverage in some adjoining areas of north-central Texas (including Sherman, Denison and Gainesville) that were able to receive KXII. In order to become more competitive with KXII, in 1983, the FCC granted Eastern Oklahoma Television a permit to construct a tower between Milburn and Bromide, Oklahoma—which became operational the following year—to enable better over-the-air reception to areas of far southern Oklahoma near the Red River and extend its reach into the Sherman–Denison area and adjoining areas of north-central Texas (including Gainesville, Bonham, and Paris).
In September 1974, KXII shifted the balance of network programming on its schedule to include a larger proportion of the CBS lineup, including most of the network's daytime shows, several prime time programs and most of its sports programming. This turned channel 12 into a hybrid station that carried almost half of NBC and CBS' respective programming inventories for the next few years. As KXII shifted its primary source of network programming from NBC to CBS in the mid-1970s, KTEN conversely added a larger proportion of NBC programs to its daytime and prime time schedules, evolving into a similar hybrid ABC/NBC station in the process. In 1974, KXII replaced NBC Nightly News with the CBS Evening News as the network newscast it carried as the lead-in to the station's 6 p.m. newscast. KXII's transitioned into a primary CBS station in January 1977; over the next eight years, the station steadily shed what NBC programming remained on its schedule. Also in 1977, KXII relocated its Ardmore facility from a building at Lincoln Center on West Main Street to one located on South Commerce Street (near US 77); this location remains in operation as a news bureau to gather stories for the Oklahoma side of the market, in conjunction with the main studio in Sherman. The station successfully petitioned the FCC to change its city of license from Ardmore to Sherman in 1992; this was done primarily to allow Grayson County to be classified as in its market for the first time in its history, taking it from the 178th-largest area of dominant influence to the 157th-largest.
In September 1985, channel 12 formally converted into an exclusive affiliate of CBS, after KTEN assumed the local rights to Today—the only NBC program that remained on KXII's schedule prior to that time—with the CBS Morning News replacing it as KXII's network morning news offering. (Even though it did not carry any NBC programs on its schedule over the nine subsequent years, TV Guide continued to identify KXII as a primary CBS/secondary NBC affiliate in the channel directory page of its Oklahoma City and North Texas editions until 1994.) The move concurrently resulted in KTEN shifting its primary affiliation to NBC, although it continued to air a reduced schedule of ABC programming and, in July 1994, added the majority of the Fox lineup (since KTEN became an exclusive NBC affiliate in September 1998, the primary feeds of the Sherman–Ada market's two commercial television stations have been represented by a single network affiliation; neither station would carry programming from any of the other major broadcast networks until KXII launched a UPN-affiliated digital subchannel in February 2006).
Gray Television ownership On April 15, 1999, Atlanta-based Gray Communications Systems (now Gray Television) announced that it would acquire KXII, Waco sister station KWTX-TV and its semi-satellite KBTX-TV in Bryan, Texas, from Bostick's three holding companies—KXII Broadcasters, Inc., KWTX Broadcasting, Inc. and Brazos Broadcasting, Inc., respectively—for $139 million. The decision to sell the stations stemmed from recommendations by shareholders of the companies because of the costs that the Bostick companies would incur in launching and operating digital television signals for the three stations, with Gray CEO Hilton H. Howell Jr. (a shareholder in KWTX) inquiring about purchasing the stations after Bostick was initially unsuccessful in reaching sale agreements with prospective buyers. Through the transaction, which was finalized on October 1, 1999, Gray paid $41.5 million in cash as well as additional cash payments for certain accounts receivable to purchase channel 12 from Bostick-owned KXII Broadcasters Inc.
KXII was one of the few remaining commercial broadcast television outlets in the United States as well as the last major network affiliate station in Oklahoma and Texas to sign off the air during the overnight hours, occurring on Saturday nights/early Sunday mornings from 2:05 to 5 a.m. This continued until September 2009, when the station adopted a full 168-hour weekly schedule, filling the formerly vacant hours on early Sunday mornings with paid programming on its main channel and KXII-DT2 and a mix of syndicated and paid programming on KXII-DT3.
KXII-DT3 KXII-DT3, branded Fox 12, is the Fox-affiliated third digital subchannel of KXII, broadcasting in 720p high definition on channel 12.3.
This subchannel's history began in 2006 as the first full-time local Fox station for the Sherman-Denison market. Prior to the launch of KXII-DT3, KTEN (channel 10) served as a secondary affiliate of Fox starting in 1994 after the network had won the broadcast rights to carry National Football Conference games from the NFL, ending CBS' 37-year broadcast association with the conference. KTEN's owners had filed for bankruptcy at the time and gained additional monetary compensation from Fox, along with allowing KTEN the ability to show every single Dallas Cowboys game that was not available on cable television. However, this affiliation agreement resulted in the station becoming even more of a hybrid network affiliate as it already had a primary NBC affiliation and a secondary affiliation with ABC, in addition to carrying select Fox programs.