KVRR (channel 15) is a television station in Fargo, North Dakota, United States, affiliated with the Fox network. It is the flagship television property of locally based Red River Broadcasting, which has owned the station since its inception. KVRR's studios are located on South 40th Street and South 9th Avenue in Fargo, and its transmitter is located near Tansem, Minnesota. KVRR also handles master control and some internal operations for sister station and fellow Fox affiliate KQDS-TV in Duluth, Minnesota.
KVRR's programming is simulcast on three full-power satellite stations: KJRR (VHF channel 7) in Jamestown, North Dakota, KBRR (VHF channel 10) in Thief River Falls, Minnesota (serving the Grand Forks area), and KNRR (VHF channel 12) in Pembina, North Dakota (which also covers parts of southern Manitoba, Canada, including Winnipeg).
History
The station first signed on the air on February 14, 1983, under the callsign KVNJ-TV. It was the first independent station in the Dakotas, as well as the first new standalone full-power commercial station to sign on in the Fargo–Grand Forks market in 29 years. WDAZ-TV (channel 8) in Grand Forks had signed on in 1967, but is co-owned with Fargo's WDAY-TV (channel 6).
The station changed its call letters to KVRR in 1985; that year, KBRR signed on from Thief River Falls as a satellite station serving Grand Forks. Satellite station KNRR signed on from Pembina in 1986, with intentions to target Winnipeg and southern Manitoba. Shortly afterward, on October 6, 1986, the three-station network became a charter affiliate of the upstart Fox network. However, like most early Fox affiliates, the stations still programmed themselves as independents, since Fox carried only one program at the time (The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers, which was beaten in the ratings by NBC's The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, from which she was subsequently banned from appearing). KJRR in Jamestown joined KVRR's regional network in 1988. KJRR served as the network's affiliate for the eastern portion of the Bismarck television market (excluding the city of Bismarck itself) until November 1999, when KNDX signed on as Fox's first affiliate in central North Dakota.
In December 1988, KVRR partnered with three other independent stations serving Minnesota—KTMA (now CW affiliate WUCW) in Minneapolis–Saint Paul, KXLI (now Ion Television owned-and-operated station KPXM) in St. Cloud and KXLT-TV (now a Fox affiliate) in Rochester—to create a new regional television network called the Minnesota Independent Network (MIN). Despite good intentions, the network never got off the ground.
The stations also carried programming from the United Paramount Network (UPN) on a tape delay from the network's debut on January 16, 1995, until its programming was dropped in 1998, due to the presence of Minneapolis UPN affiliate KMSP-TV on cable providers in most of KVRR's viewing area (when KMSP became a Fox owned-and-operated station in September 2002, KCPM in Grand Forks signed on as a full-time UPN station in 2003).
From the mid-1990s until March 2015, KVRR did not include any regional, channel, or call letter branding on-air outside of Federal Communications Commission (FCC)-required station identifications, a rarity among American television stations. The four stations were collectively branded as "Your Fox Station" or simply "Fox." When the station began a news department in 2000, it was branded as Fox News. The station began phasing out the "Fox" branding in favor of simply branding by the KVRR call letters in March 2015. Station management stated that the rebrand was done to bring its branding in line with the Fargo market's other major network stations, all but one of which (CBS affiliate KXJB-LD, which brands by its former channel number as "KX4", now occupied by KRDK-TV) has long branded with their call letters. The move was also intended to distinguish the station from Fox News Channel; KVRR is one of only a handful of Fox affiliates that omits network references in their branding. KVRR launched a website on September 15, 2011.
In the summer of 2015, Red River Broadcasting announced that Antenna TV will be carried on the digital subchannels of all of its owned TV stations and satellite stations on January 1, 2016, including KVRR (relayed on KBRR, KJRR, and KNRR), KQDS-TV in Duluth, and KDLT-TV in Sioux Falls, South Dakota (relayed on KDLV in Mitchell); KDLT/KDLV would soon be sold to Gray Television in 2018, though continuing to broadcast Antenna TV on its own.
