KABC-TV

For other uses, see KABC.
KABC-TV
Los Angeles, California
United States
Branding ABC 7 (general)
ABC 7 Eyewitness News (newscasts)
Slogan Welcome to the circle
Channels Digital: 7 (VHF)
Virtual: 7 (PSIP)
Subchannels (see article)
Translators (see article)
Affiliations ABC (O&O)
Owner Disney/ABC
(ABC Holding Company, Inc.)
First air date September 16, 1949 (1949-09-16)
Call letters' meaning K American Broadcasting Company
Sister station(s) KSPN, KDIS
Former callsigns KECA-TV (1949–1954)
Former channel number(s) Analog:
7 (VHF, 1949–2009)
Digital:
53 (UHF, until 2009)
Transmitter power 28.7 kW
Height 978 metres (3,209 feet)
Facility ID 282
Transmitter coordinates 34°13′37″N 118°3′58″W / 34.22694°N 118.06611°W / 34.22694; -118.06611Coordinates: 34°13′37″N 118°3′58″W / 34.22694°N 118.06611°W / 34.22694; -118.06611
Licensing authority FCC
Public license information: Profile
CDBS
Website www.abc7.com

KABC-TV, channel 7, is an ABC owned-and-operated television station located in Los Angeles, California, United States. The station is owned by ABC Owned Television Stations, a unit of the Disney-ABC Television Group division of the Disney Media Networks subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. KABC maintains studios and offices on Circle Seven Drive (off Interstate 5) in Glendale, and its transmitter is located atop Mount Wilson.

In the few areas of the western United States where an ABC station is not receivable over-the-air, KABC-TV is available on satellite television through DirecTV.

In addition to the Disney-owned TV station, which includes award-winning programming on its schedule such as Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune, it also has two sister radio stations. One is a standalone children's pop music 24/7 station while the other is a standalone sports network through KSPN. The former is locally-based as the local RD station is considered the flagship of the network while the latter is the Los Angeles and West Coast O&O flagship of the ESPN Radio network.

History

An early KECA-TV logo slide from 1949 to 1954.

Channel 7 first signed on the air under the callsign KECA-TV on September 16, 1949. At the same time, it was the last television station licensed to Los Angeles operating on the VHF band to sign on, and the last of ABC's five original owned-and-operated stations to make its debut (after San Francisco's KGO-TV, which signed on four months earlier).

The station's callsign was named after Los Angeles broadcasting pioneer Earle C. Anthony, whose initials were also present on channel 7's then-sister radio station, KECA (790 AM, now KABC), which had served as the Los Angeles affiliate of the NBC Blue Network. Anthony's other Los Angeles radio station, KFI, was aligned with the NBC Red Network. The Red Network survived the split of the two NBC radio networks ordered by the Federal Communications Commission in 1943. Edward J. Noble, who bought the Blue Network (beginning its transformation into ABC), purchased KECA radio a year later when the FCC forced Anthony to divest one of his Los Angeles radio stations. On February 1, 1954, KECA-TV changed its callsign to the present-day KABC-TV.

From the time of its initial sign-on in 1949, channel 7 was located at the ABC Television Center (now called the Prospect Studios), on Prospect Avenue in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, east of Hollywood. In December 1999, KABC-TV moved from the Los Feliz studios to a new state-of-the-art facility designed by César Pelli in nearby Glendale. The station is currently a short distance from both the ABC West Coast headquarters and the headquarters of corporate parent The Walt Disney Company in Burbank.

KABC-TV has used the Circle 7 logo since 1962 (the same year ABC created and implemented its current logo), and augmented its bottom left quadrant with the ABC network logo in 1997. The station's news anchors and reporters wear Circle 7 lapel pins when they appear on camera, a practice that had once been standard at each of the original five ABC-owned stations.

In 1984, KABC-TV became the first West Coast TV station to air 'Stereo audio' for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games.

On February 4, 2006, KABC-TV became the first television station in the state of California to broadcast its local newscasts in high definition. Along with the in-house upgrades, the station debuted an upgraded news set and an update to its theme music (Gari Media Group's Eyewitness News).

In July 2010, The Walt Disney Company became engaged in a carriage dispute with Time Warner Cable (the first such incident since a 2000 dispute that pulled ABC's owned-and-operated stations from the cable provider using the stations as leverage for carriage of Toon Disney and Soapnet, and basic cable carriage of the Disney Channel, which had been carried as a premium channel at the time).[1] This dispute involved KABC-TV and three other ABC owned-and-operated stations, Disney Channel and the ESPN family of networks. If a deal was not in place, all of the Disney-owned channels would have been removed from Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks systems across the United States. The Walt Disney Company and Time Warner Cable reached a long-term agreement to keep the stations and their sister cable channels on Time Warner Cable and its co-managed systems on September 2, 2010.

Digital television

Digital channels

The station's digital signal is multiplexed:

Channel Video Aspect PSIP Short Name Programming[2]
7.1 720p 16:9 KABC-DT Main KABC-TV programming / ABC
7.2 LivWell Live Well Network HD
7.3 480i 4:3 LAFF Laff [3]

In addition to Live Well Network programming, digital subchannel 7.2 also carries rebroadcasts of KABC's local newscasts, public affairs programs and syndicated shows; it also handles the responsibility of carrying programs normally seen on main channel 7.1, due to preemptions caused by long-form breaking news coverage (of note, are occurrences in 2007 when ABC7+ aired ESPN on ABC sports programming due to continuous live news coverage of local wildfires on KABC: the Subway 500 NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series race on October 21 and the first round of the Skins Game golf tournament on November 24). On September 12, 2009, ABC7+ aired live coverage of a memorial service at Dodger Stadium for two members of the Los Angeles County Fire Department who died while fighting the Station Fire in the Angeles National Forest (KABC's Saturday morning ABC Kids children's programming aired as scheduled without preemption).

Digital channel 7.3 previously carried programming from The Local AccuWeather Channel, it was replaced with a standard-definition feed of the Live Well Network in 2010. On April 15, 2015, the comedy network Laff replaced the standard-definition feed of LWN on 7.3.[3]

Analog-to-digital conversion

KABC-TV shut down its analog signal, over VHF channel 7, at noon on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television.[4] The station's digital signal relocated from its pre-transition UHF channel 53, 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 VHF channel 7 for post-transition operations.[5] After the transition occurred, some viewers had difficulty receiving KABC's signal, despite operating at a high effective radiated power of 25,000 watts. On March 31, 2009, KABC-TV filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission to upgrade its signal strength to 28,700 watts.[6] It was granted a construction permit on March 3, 2011.[7]

Local programming

News programming

Former ABC 7 Eyewitness News newscast title card used until October 31, 2015.

KABC-TV presently broadcasts 44 hours 25 minutes of locally produced newscasts each week (with 6 hours 35 minutes on weekdays, 6½ hours on Saturday and 5 hours on Sunday). Atypical of ABC stations and major network affiliates in general, KABC-TV produces an hour-long newscast at 4 p.m. on weekend afternoons. KABC-TV is one of two Los Angeles television stations with a full-time presence in California's state capital of Sacramento. Since 2003, the station has shared resources with sister stations KGO-TV in San Francisco and KFSN-TV in Fresno to staff a news bureau in Sacramento following Arnold Schwarzenegger's election to the office of Governor of California, during the 2003 California recall.

"Lew Irwin Reports," the station's first locally produced newscast, debuted in 1957. Initially, the 15-minute program was broadcast nightly (Monday through Saturday) at 11:00 p.m. and featured Irwin delivering a news summary prepared by KABC Radio newswriters, followed by a seven-minute feature written by Irwin that included footage shot for the program by the MGM-owned newsreel company Telenews. Irwin interviewed a host of public figures for the program, including former President Harry Truman, then-Senator John Kennedy, philosopher Bertrand Russell, actor Marlon Brando, H-bomb scientist Edward Teller, and poets Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg. Irwin's features often included news-breaking investigations into such controversial topics as migrant workers, police brutality, proprietary hospitals, disc jockey payola, the Hollywood blacklist, and the John Birch Society. In a letter to ABC News chief James Hagerty in 1961, Sandburg wrote: "He is one of the great reporters in America today....I could make a case that he is one of the most useful citizens." In 1962 a new KABC-TV program director for the station mounted a second newscast on the station (following John Daly's network newscast in the early evening) presented by Ed Fleming, who had previously worked for rival KNXT. A few months later, he decided to feature Fleming and Irwin on both the early-evening and late-night newscasts, with Fleming delivering the hard news and Irwin a long-form feature. After numerous clashes between the program director and Irwin, Irwin resigned in 1962 citing creative differences. He was eventually succeeded by KCOP-TV newscaster Baxter Ward, who was backed by the station's first staff film crew.

KABC-TV first adopted the Eyewitness News format for its newscasts in February 1969, not long after it became popular on New York City sister station WABC-TV. Like the other ABC-owned stations, Channel 7 used the "Tar Sequence" cue from the soundtrack of the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke as its theme music, and continued to use it even after the others adopted an updated version of the theme, the Frank Gari-composed "News Series 2000". Later on, the original Cool Hand Luke theme was used by the station only during the main newscast open. The station's newscasts used a synthesized version of the old theme (composed by Frank Becker) during the mid-1980s, before KABC-TV picked up the News Series 2000 package in 1990. In 1995, KABC began using Gari Media Group's Eyewitness News music package, which remains as the station's news theme to this day.

Notable on-air staff who have worked for the station's news department include Jerry Dunphy, Christine Lund, Bill Bonds, Lisa McRee, Harold Greene, Tawny Little, Laura Diaz, Paul Moyer, Chuck Henry, Dr. George Fischbeck, Regis Philbin, Judd Rose and Bill Weir. Former channel 7 sports reporters and anchors include Stu Nahan, former NFL players Lynn Swann, Gene Washington, Jim Hill and Bob Chandler, and former Major League Baseball player (and current Los Angeles Dodgers radio analyst and play-by-play announcer) Rick Monday.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the station's newscasts often included spirited miniature debates and commentaries reflecting various political viewpoints. Several notable politicians and political pundits appeared on these segments including Proposition 13 backer Howard Jarvis, former U.S. Representative and Senator John Tunney, Bruce Herschensohn, Bill Press and Baxter Ward. In addition, like many other stations at the time, KABC-TV aired brief editorials from the station's general manager, most notably John Severino, who served throughout the 1980s; this practice was discontinued in 1990.

During the 1980s, KABC-TV was one of a few stations in the country to run a three-hour block of local newscasts on weekdays from 4 to 7 p.m. The station was the first in the region, if not the state, to introduce an hour-long newscast at 4 p.m., first anchored by Jerry Dunphy and Tawny Little in September 1980. Before this, the station ran two hours of news from 5–7 p.m. The station reduced this block by one half-hour in 1990, when it moved World News Tonight from 7 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. For a time in the late 1980s, its 6:30 p.m. newscast was titled Eyewitness Update and served as a final recap of the day's news, similar in nature to an 11 p.m. newscast. KABC-TV is one of three ABC stations on the West Coast to air World News at 6:30 p.m. (the two other ABC stations to do this being KGTV/San Diego and KAEF/Eureka); most other ABC stations in the western United States run the program at either 5:30 or 6 p.m. When the network soap opera Port Charles ended its run in 2003, channel 7 expanded its midday newscast to a full hour.

On January 13, 2014, KABC-TV started producing an hour-long 8 p.m. newscast on KDOC-TV (as of November 17, 2014, the newscast has moved to 7 p.m.); the newscast airs seven nights a week. Concurrently, KDOC also added a midnight rebroadcast of KABC's 11 p.m. newscast.[8] KABC is the fifth ABC owned-and-operated station to enter into a news share agreement (after WTVD, KGO-TV, WPVI-TV and KFSN-TV).

References
[9][10][11][12][13]

Ratings

The introduction of the Eyewitness News format, followed by the addition of syndicated staples such as The Oprah Winfrey Show (in 1986), Live! with Kelly (in 1991), Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune (both in 1992) has generally allowed KABC to maintain a substantial ratings advantage over its competition. Leveraging the strength of its sizeable lead-in at 3 p.m. by the now-defunct Oprah, KABC has long held first or second in the ratings for its 4 to 6:30 p.m. news block. However, ratings leads for the morning and late news have typically been spirited (and expensive) battles with local stations KTLA and KTTV in the morning, and KNBC (and recently KCBS-TV) at 11 p.m.

With its across-the-board ratings success in hand, the station has been known to run quick five-second promos throughout the day that feature the slogan, "ABC7 – #1 in news, #1 in Southern California." This is a throwback to its openers during the 1980s, when the station proudly proclaimed itself "Number One in Southern California." On November 1, 2015 the station debuted a new set along with new graphics.

Current on-air staff


Notable former on-air staff

Other locally produced programming

KABC-TV produces several local shows including Vista L.A. (which profiles Latino life in Southern California), and Eye on L.A. (which has been on the air in some form since the early 1980s). On weekends, the station airs Eyewitness Newsmakers, hosted by reporter Adrienne Alpert. The station produces a sports/variety-type show called ABC 7 Sports Zone, which formerly originated from the ESPN Zone in Anaheim. This show airs occasionally following network telecasts of NCAA football and NBA games. Most ABC 7 Sports Zone shows now originate from local sports venues including the Los Angeles Coliseum, the Rose Bowl in Pasadena and Staples Center in Los Angeles, and occasionally at the station's Glendale studios. It is hosted by Rob Fukuzaki, and is joined during the basketball season by former Los Angeles Laker great Michael Cooper. This program is a spin-off of Monday Night Live, which aired on KABC-TV from 1989 until Monday Night Football left the network after the 2005 NFL season. That show was hosted by Todd Donoho until 1997, and later Bill Weir and Rob Fukuzaki and featured an extensive trivia contest.

The station also produces a weekly entertainment program OnTheRedCarpet, hosted by Rachel Smith (who also appears on ABC's Good Morning America as a features reporter and Saturday host of the program's "Pop News" segment). This program is also aired on other ABC-owned stations. Prior to ABC's annual telecasts of the Academy Awards, KABC-TV produces a live pre-awards show and post-awards show, On The Red Carpet at the Oscars, featuring red carpet interviews and fashion commentary. This show also airs on the network's other O&O stations and is syndicated to several ABC affiliates and other broadcasters outside the country.

In the past, KABC-TV featured various locally produced shows such as AM Los Angeles; a morning talk show which at various times featured personalities Regis Philbin, Sarah Purcell, Ralph Story, Tawny Little, Cristina Ferrare, Cyndy Garvey, and Steve Edwards as hosts. Edwards also hosted a short-lived afternoon show in the mid-1980s called 330, which aired after the ABC soap opera The Edge of Night (Live! with Kelly and Michael, formerly co-hosted by Philbin until 2011 and produced at New York sister station WABC-TV, now occupies the former time slot of AM Los Angeles).

On April 30, 1954, KABC-TV aired a preview program, Dig Me Later, Vampira, hosted by Maila Nurmi at 11 p.m. The Vampira Show premiered on the following night, May 1, 1954. For the first four weeks, the show aired at midnight, and it moved to 11 p.m. on May 29. Ten months later on March 5, 1955, the series began airing at 10:30 p.m. As Vampira, Nurmi introduced films while wandering through a hallway of mist and cobwebs. Her horror-related comedy antics included talking to her pet spider Rollo and encouraging viewers to write for epitaphs instead of autographs. When the series was cancelled in 1955, she retained rights to the character of Vampira.

In 1964, Pinky Lee attempted a return to kids television by hosting a local children's comedy program on KABC-TV. The series was also seen in national syndication from 1964 to 1965. But the program fell prey to creative interference from the show's producers and from station management. Lee tried to fight off the creative interference, but his efforts were for naught. The 1960s version of "The Pinky Lee Kids TV Show" went off the air after one season.

Rebroadcasters

KABC is rebroadcast on the following translator stations:

See also

References

  1. ↑ Entertainment ABC to return to Time Warner Cable CNN, May 3, 2000
  2. ↑ "RabbitEars.Info". rabbitears.info.
  3. 1 2 Lafayette, Jon (January 18, 2015). "Exclusive: Comedy Multicast Net Launching on ABC, Scripps". Broadcasting & Cable. Retrieved January 20, 2015.
  4. ↑ List of Digital Full-Power Stations
  5. ↑ FCC DTV status report for KABC
  6. ↑ "CDBS Print". Licensing.fcc.gov. Retrieved 2015-08-02.
  7. ↑ Archived October 26, 2012, at the Wayback Machine.
  8. ↑ "KDOC To Air KABC-Produced Newscast". TVNewsCheck. November 21, 2013. Retrieved November 21, 2013.
  9. ↑ http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/OTg2WDY4MA==/z/4CIAAOxygPtS6VBM/$_35.JPG
  10. ↑ "Independent Star-News from Pasadena, California · Page 73". Newspapers.com. 1961-01-15. Retrieved 2015-08-02.
  11. ↑ (page 35)
  12. ↑ (1960 Great Western Savings ad)
  13. ↑ "Trumbo - Cast, Crew, Director and Awards". NYTimes.com. 2008-06-27. Retrieved 2015-08-02.
  14. ↑ "Kevin O'Connell Basic Information". Retrieved 5 July 2012.

External links

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