KCNC-TV

KCNC-TV (channel 4), branded CBS Colorado, is a television station in Denver, Colorado, United States, serving as the market's CBS outlet. It is owned and operated by the network's CBS News and Stations division, and maintains studios on Lincoln Street (between East 10th and 11th Avenues) in downtown Denver; its transmitter is based on Lookout Mountain, near Golden.

The station first signed on the air at 6:30 p.m. on December 24, 1953, as KOA-TV. KOA-TV brought NBC programming to the area which prior to the station's launch, was temporarily discontinued. The station aired an inaugural program followed by the Christmas feature The Lamb and the Manger. Founded by Metropolitan TV Company (partly owned by famed comedian Bob Hope, and not to be confused with a similarly named company later known as Metromedia), owners of KOA radio (850 AM and 103.5 FM, now KRFX), channel 4 immediately assumed the NBC affiliation from KBTV (channel 9, now KUSA), due to KOA radio's longtime affiliation with and ownership by the NBC Red Network.

In 1965, KOA-TV began carrying most of NBC's American Football League game telecasts as the network obtained the league's broadcast television rights (with play-by-play announcing duties handled by Curt Gowdy); however, Denver Broncos home games aired by the network had to be blacked out due to the team's inability to sell out tickets to the games (NFL blackout rules in effect at the time required teams to sell all tickets for home games in order to allow them to be broadcast in the team's primary market; the league later lowered the designated sales threshold to allow home game broadcasts to 75% of all tickets, and as of 2015, the blackout rules have been lifted indefinitely), this partnership continues to this day with CBS (with exception of a hiatus from the second week of the 1995 season to end of the 1997 season, when most games moved to KUSA in that interim period). In 1967, KOA-TV ran an award-winning documentary The Acid Test, LSD; hosted by news editor Bob Palmer, the film took five months to produce with more than 5,000 feet of film shot. Photographers involved included Bill Baker, Medill Barnes, Allan Bisset, Jerry Curran, Sam Houston and Barry Trader.

In 1968, Metropolitan TV Company sold KOA-AM-TV to General Electric for $10 million. General Electric sold the KOA and KOAQ radio stations to A. H. Belo Corporation in 1983 for $22 million, as part of the company's overall exit from broadcasting. GE retained channel 4, but was required by FCC regulations at the time—which forbade TV and radio stations in the same city, but with different owners from sharing the same call letters—to change the station's call letters to KCNC-TV (standing for "Colorado's News Channel"), which it officially adopted on August 12 of that year.

In 1986, General Electric acquired NBC, resulting in GE's return to broadcasting and KCNC becoming the first owned-and-operated station of a major network in the state of Colorado. In 1987, control of the station has been transferred from GE itself to NBC, becoming a proper O&O. By 1990, KCNC-TV devoted nearly all of its programming hours outside of network shows to locally produced news programs, broadcasting nearly 40 hours of newscasts each week. General manager Roger Ogden felt his station's money was better spent on local programming, rather than paying syndication distributors to acquire nationally syndicated shows. In 1990, KCNC paid $11,000 to the market's PBS member station KRMA-TV (channel 6) to carry the station's election coverage (using KCNC's reporters), in order to allow channel 4 to air NBC's Tuesday night lineup, including Matlock and In the Heat of the Night.

By early 1995, KCNC-TV was airing 41 hours of news a week, and the station programmed either local-interest programming or newscasts at times when NBC did not have network programming, because the station did not buy syndicated programming. This ended almost as soon as Group W/CBS took over after the affiliation switch.

On July 14, 1994, CBS and Westinghouse Electric Corporation agreed to a long-term affiliation deal that would result in three of Westinghouse's television stations (longtime ABC affiliate WJZ-TV in Baltimore and longtime NBC stations KYW-TV in Philadelphia and WBZ-TV in Boston) become CBS affiliates, joining the company's two longtime CBS affiliates (KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh and KPIX in San Francisco). The deal initially called for CBS to sell its owned-and-operated Philadelphia station WCAU; however, CBS later discovered that if it sold WCAU in order to affiliate with KYW-TV, it would have had to pay hefty capital gains taxes on the profit of the transaction. To alleviate this problem, in November 1994, NBC decided to swap ownership of KCNC-TV and KUTV in Salt Lake City (which NBC had acquired the month before), along with the VHF channel 4 allocation and transmitter in Miami to CBS in exchange for WCAU and the VHF channel 6 allocation and transmitter in Miami, which for legal purposes made the deal an even trade.

KCNC-TV became Denver's CBS affiliate at 12:07 a.m. on September 10, 1995, after a rerun of Saturday Night Live ended, as part of a three-way affiliation swap involving each of the market's "Big Three" network affiliates. Longtime CBS affiliate KMGH-TV (channel 7) switched its affiliation to ABC through a multi-station affiliation agreement with KMGH's owners at the time, McGraw-Hill; while longtime ABC affiliate KUSA took the NBC affiliation through a multi-station affiliation agreement with the Gannett Company, which itself was spurred by the initial affiliation deal that was reached between New World Communications and Fox. (Gannett had already owned several NBC affiliates at the time, as is the case in the present day with successor company Tegna Inc.) Under the terms of the CBS/Westinghouse deal, CBS a sold controlling ownership interest (55%) in KCNC to Westinghouse's broadcasting division Group W. The previous month on August 1, Westinghouse had acquired CBS for $5.4 billion; once the merger was finalized on November 24, 1995, KCNC-TV became a CBS-owned-and-operated station, making it one of a handful of television stations that have been owned by two different networks at separate points in its history. As of 2025^[update], KCNC, along with CW outlet KWGN-TV (through its owner Nexstar Media Group) are the only television stations in the Denver market that are owned-and-operated stations of one of the five major English language broadcast networks (concurrent to the CBS-Westinghouse merger, Fox had acquired KDVR (channel 31), which it would eventually sell to Local TV in 2008; it is now owned by Nexstar Media Group alongside KWGN-TV).