KTEN (channel 10) is a television station licensed to Ada, Oklahoma, United States, serving the Sherman, Texas–Ada, Oklahoma, market as an affiliate of NBC, The CW Plus, and ABC. The station is owned by Lockwood Broadcast Group, and maintains primary studios on High Point Circle (near Katy Memorial Expressway/US 75) in northwestern Denison, Texas, with secondary studios at the Ardmore Energy Center on Merrick Drive (near North Commerce Street) in northwestern Ardmore. Its transmitter is located along State Highway 7 in rural northeastern Johnston County, Oklahoma (west of Wapanucka and southwest of Bromide).
History Early history KTEN's history traces back to 1952, when Eastern Oklahoma Television Inc.—a locally based company owned by Bill Hoover, C. C. Morris and Brown Morris, who also owned radio stations KADA (1230 AM) in Ada and KWSH (1260 AM) in Wewoka through their Oklahoma Broadcasting Company subsidiary—applied with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a license to operate a television station on VHF channel 12 (the 1952 assignment of the frequency to the Sherman–Ada media market under the Sixth Report and Order consequently resulted in the FCC also moving the channel 12 allocation originally assigned to Waco, Texas westward to Abilene—where it would become occupied by present-day ABC affiliate KTXS-TV—to avoid interference with any Sherman–Ada station that would be assigned to that channel). Hoover's firm purchased a plot of land located north of Ada with the intention to build a studio and transmitter facility for the station, for which it originally filed to use KEO as its call letters. Shortly after the FCC granted the license application to the Hoover group (now given the call letters KEOK) in 1953, Eastern Oklahoma Television reached an agreement with the FCC to assign its proposed station to VHF channel 10, a second television frequency allocated to the Sherman–Ada market under the Report and Order memorandum; the group subsequently applied to use KTEN as its call sign, becoming the first applicant to incorporate their station's channel number into its call letters in an FCC license filing.
The station first signed on the air on June 1, 1954, as the first television station to sign on in the Ada–Sherman market, Originally based out of studio facilities located on Arlington Street in Ada (which continues to serve as its city of license to this day), channel 10 originally maintained a primary affiliation with ABC, with programming from NBC airing on a secondary basis; this was very unusual for a two-station market, especially a small DMA the size of Sherman–Ada. During the late 1950s, it was also briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network. Prior to the sign-on of KTEN, Texoma area residents were only available to receive over-the-air television service via stations based in the adjacent Oklahoma City, Dallas–Fort Worth and Wichita Falls–Lawton markets; even still, these stations only provided Grade B coverage at best in the northern and western counties of south-central Oklahoma and in parts of north-central Texas; reception of these fringe stations requiring a strong outdoor antenna in Ardmore, Tishomingo and Sulphur, Oklahoma, Gainesville and Denison, Texas, and surrounding areas.
Among KTEN's earliest personalities was Churches of Christ televangelist Mack Lyon, who began his television career with channel 10 as a producer and speaker for a religious program which aired on the station. It was the first regularly scheduled television program produced by the ministry. From the fall of 1980 until 1982, during the tail end of his tenure as the church's pastor, Lyon hosted a weekly ministry program by the Wewoka Church of Christ that also aired locally on KTEN. Lyon would become known among national audiences after he started In Search of the Lord's Way, a syndicated weekly program that he developed as a television outreach of the Edmond Church of Christ in 1982, which Lyon hosted until 2010, when he retired and Phil Sanders replaced him as host; in addition to its carriage on local commercial and independent religious television stations throughout North America, Search also aired nationally on the now-defunct American Christian Television System (ACTS) during the early- and mid-1990s.
Channel 10 would eventually gain a competitor when a consortium led by Maurine Easley and Albert Riesen, the daughter and son-in-law of John Easley, longtime owner of The Ardmoreite and radio station KVSO (1240 AM), signed on KVSO-TV (channel 12, now KXII) in Ardmore on August 12, 1956; KVSO assumed the local rights to NBC programming from KTEN, and also served as a secondary CBS affiliate. On June 1, 1964, Eastern Oklahoma Television commenced construction on a new studio and production facility for KTEN on 1600 Arlington Street in Ada. When the studio opened the following year, it was dedicated in an opening ceremony by actor Clint Walker (then the star of the ABC western series Cheyenne) and television and radio journalist Paul Harvey. KTEN would eventually gain a third radio sister in 1967, when Hoover's Oklahoma Broadcasting group signed on KEOR (1000 AM) in Atoka.
As a primary NBC/secondary ABC affiliate By the time KXII disaffiliated from the network to exclusively align with CBS in 1977, KTEN began carrying a larger proportion of NBC programming within its schedule. Over time, channel 10 had aired the majority of the daytime and prime time program offerings from both NBC and ABC. From 1977 to 1980, it even aired the national evening newscasts from both networks in the hour preceding its local newscast at 6 p.m. (with ABC's World News Tonight airing at 5, followed by NBC Nightly News at 5:30 p.m.). The station received national attention in 1983, when Doc Severinsen, who was sitting in for Johnny Carson's sidekick Ed McMahon on the noted episode, welcomed KTEN as the newest station to begin carriage of NBC's The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. KTEN's acquisition of the late-night talk show occurred after KXII—which had whittled its clearance of NBC programs within its schedule down to just two shows by this time—opted to begin clearing CBS's late night schedule in a move that eventually led channel 12 toward exclusively aligning with CBS in 1985.
Although KTEN and KXII had theoretically been direct competitors for many years, the difference between their respective transmitter sites created disproportionate over-the-air reception of the two stations. Viewers living in parts of south-central Oklahoma close to KXII's transmitter (such as Ardmore, Madill and Durant) experienced fair to poor signal reception of the KTEN signal, which in turn had almost non-existent coverage in some adjoining areas of north-central Texas. Conversely, Ada and surrounding areas on the Oklahoma side of the market had poor over-the-air reception of KXII, as those areas lied on the northern fringe of that station's signal coverage radius. In order to become more competitive with KXII, in 1983, the FCC granted Eastern Oklahoma Television a permit to construct a tower north of Milburn, Oklahoma, which would operate at 316,000 watts of power (the maximum power allowable for stations broadcasting on VHF channels 7–13). The new tower, from which the station began operating its transmitter the following year, would provide better over-the-air reception to areas of far southern Oklahoma located near the Red River (including Ardmore, Durant, Madill, Atoka and parts of Hugo) and extend its reach across the river to the Sherman-Denison area and adjoining areas of north-central Texas (including Gainesville, Bonham, and Paris), where reception of KTEN had previously been marginal if not non-existent.
On February 3, 1985, Eastern Oklahoma Television sold the station to Channel 10 L.P. (later renamed KTEN Television L.P.), a consortium headed by a group of investors led by Durant businessman Tom Johnson, along with Madill-based businessmen Allen Wheeler, John Massey, David Webb and Phillip Stumpff. Johnson planned to take over as the station's general manager, based out of a satellite office in Durant; FCC approval of the sale, however, was held up for three years and did not occur until November 16, 1988. As a condition of approval, the Johnson-led group stated that it would open a secondary studio facility for KTEN on Merrick Drive (near North Commerce Street) in Ardmore, which opened in October 1985. In January 1986, KTEN opened a tertiary studio facility in the Katy Depot in downtown Denison, which originally housed a news bureau and certain back office operations; the Ada facility would remain in operation as the base of channel 10's news operations, and its programming, master control and advertising sales departments.
In 1992, KTEN Television L.P. filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy claim and a petition for financial reorganization to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Oklahoma. As part of the group's reorganization plan, Tom Johnson and his business partner, Dennis Hall, secured commitments from Durant-based First National Bank and Durant Bank & Trust totaling $1.16 million to acquire an interest in the KTEN Television group's assets; in the winter of late 1992, the group sought permission from the Oklahoma Industrial Finance Authority (OIFA) to provide an additional $1.05 million to the $5 million in loans needed to finance the purchase. The OIFA approved the loan request on February 24, 1993, on the provision that Johnson approach an Ada-based bank to obtain a loan for the remaining $1 million to complete the transaction and that the trust authority be paid in full in the form of a balloon payment by year three of the 15-year loan term.
In May 1993, KTEN adopted a 24-hour-a-day programming schedule, initially filling overnight time periods following the NBC late night lineup with a mix of syndicated programs and movies. By this time, KTEN was gravitating toward becoming a primary NBC affiliate, but continued to carry a large proportion of ABC's schedule; the station even incorporated localized versions of promotional image campaigns produced by both networks. (The station later began clearing ABC's overnight newscast, World News Now, in the time period originally occupied by the overnight film showcases in July 1994.) Although KTEN's programming schedule appeared to be transitioning its network allegiance exclusively to NBC by the early to mid-1990s, another network move was made along the way.
Tertiary affiliation with Fox In July 1994, KTEN began maintaining a second primary affiliation with the Fox Broadcasting Company, a move it made (on May 24 of that year) in part to regain some financial footing by way of the monetary compensation that the station would be given by Fox. Because the Sherman–Ada market did not have enough commercial television stations to sustain an exclusive affiliation, Texoma area residents could only watch Fox network programming via the network's cable feed, Foxnet, or through out-of-market affiliates—KOKH-TV in Oklahoma City, KJTL in Wichita Falls or Fox owned-and-operated station KDAF [now a CW affiliate] in Dallas–Fort Worth—that provided a Grade B over-the-air signal in certain areas or were available on local cable providers.