KTSF (channel 26) is a multicultural independent television station licensed to San Francisco, California, United States, serving the San Francisco Bay Area. The station is owned by the Lincoln Broadcasting Company, and maintains studios on Valley Drive in south suburban Brisbane. Through a channel sharing agreement with Univision owned-and-operated station KDTV-DT (channel 14), the two stations transmit using KDTV-DT's spectrum from an antenna atop Mount Allison. Until May 7, 2018, KTSF's transmitter was located atop San Bruno Mountain.
History
In 1965, Lillian Lincoln Howell was issued a broadcast license for a new television station in San Francisco. Her goal was to offer programming to audiences that were not targeted by the television stations already on the air at the time, with her stated mission being to "serve the underserved". It took several years to build the station, but when KTSF finally went on air on September 4, 1976, it began broadcasting a general entertainment format featuring older off-network shows from 1950 to 1965, anime, live-action shows dubbed in English, older movies during the day, and Asian programming after 7:00 p.m. weekdays and 4:00 p.m. weekends. For many years, a half-hour horse racing program hosted by Sam Speer brought a video of the Golden Gate Fields or Bay Meadows daily results, which ran until December 2017. The station also ran religious programs in the morning hours such as The PTL Club and Praise the Lord. Entertainment shows included Dennis the Menace, The Donna Reed Show, Hazel, The Flying Nun, Father Knows Best, Lassie, Marine Boy, Ultraman, King Kong cartoons and The Space Giants. At that time, four other independent Bay Area stations had general entertainment schedules, including KTVU, KTZO (now KOFY-TV), KICU, and KBHK-TV (now KPYX). By 1981, the Japanese animated and live-action shows were dropped, as well as the station's -TV suffix on New Year's Day. Jay Peterson was one of the main announcers with studios located in the China Basin Building. KTSF was also the first U.S. broadcaster to carry Asian-language programming.
KTSF discontinued Chinese and other Asian programming during weeknights on August 17, 1980, relegating it to weekend afternoons. Daily after 7:00 p.m., the station picked up a subscription TV service called Super-Time, later STAR TV, operated by Subscription Television of San Francisco. Two films were offered that first night: The First Great Train Robbery (1978) and Cuba (1979). Its signal would appear scrambled, with an audio message being played that described the service and provided a phone number to subscribe. Descrambler boxes could be rented to view the channel. In 1983, Satellite Television & Associated Resources, the parent company of Subscription Television of San Francisco and part-owner of a similar service in Boston, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and was liquidated. STAR TV was replaced by another service, Select TV, but in late 1984, Vision Enterprises, the operator, declared bankruptcy, and a federal judge allowed KTSF to stop carrying their programming over $250,000 in unpaid fees to the station.
In 1983, KTSF expanded its Asian content to reflect the changing demographics of the Bay Area. With increasing immigration of the Bay Area's Asian population from the Philippines and Korea, KTSF began producing Tagalog and Korean content and expanded its schedule to include programming from India and Iran. The station began running this programming daily in the afternoon. With Select TV having collapsed, KTSF expanded its Asian offerings to evenings and overnights as well. In 1985, KTSF dropped general English entertainment programming, partly due to the fact that San Francisco had four other stations employing that format.
A significant step in the station's history came in 1987 when it hired Gallup to perform the first Chinese-language consumer study ever conducted in the United States. The Gallup study demonstrated to mainstream U.S. companies that the Chinese-American market behaved like most other groups. For instance, the vast majority of Chinese people had bank accounts at mainstream financial institutions such as Bank of America and Wells Fargo, while only a small percentage had accounts at Chinese-owned banks. The major grocery store chains, with their large variety of products and convenient locations, were patronized by 75% of Chinese-Americans on a weekly basis. With this new research, KTSF was able to attract mainstream U.S. companies to the Asian-American market.
KTSF won its only San Francisco / Northern California Emmy Awards in 1987 when animator Brian Clark redesigned the station's on-air identity package.