KFSN-TV
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KFSN-TV

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KFSN-TV

KFSN-TV (channel 30) is a television station in Fresno, California, United States, serving as the market's ABC network outlet. It is owned and operated by the network's ABC Owned Television Stations division, and maintains studios on G Street in downtown Fresno; its transmitter is located on Bear Mountain, near Meadow Lakes, California.

Fresno is the smallest television market in California with a "Big Four" network O&O.

After the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s four-year-long freeze on awarding television station licenses was lifted in 1952, two radio stations—KARM (1430 AM, now KFIG) and KFRE (940 AM, now KYNO) competed for the construction permit to operate a station on channel 12, the sole VHF allocation given to Fresno. KFRE won the permit, and the station first signed on the air on May 10, 1956, as KFRE-TV (for Fresno). It is the third-oldest television station in the Fresno market in a three-year timeframe and upon signing on, KFRE-TV took the CBS affiliation from KJEO (channel 47, now KGPE). This made Fresno one of the smallest markets where each network gained full-time affiliations at the time.

The KFRE stations were acquired by Triangle Publications in 1959. On February 17, 1961, KFRE-TV reluctantly moved to UHF channel 30 to make Fresno an all-UHF market under orders from the FCC. It was known by the term deintermixture, the move was made for the purpose of leveling the playing field and eliminating the potential of unfair competition between the VHF and UHF bands. A similar situation occurred in nearby Bakersfield where that city's lone VHF station, KERO-TV on channel 10, moved to UHF channel 23 in 1963. The move of KFRE-TV to channel 30 opened up channel 12 for use by KCOY-TV in Santa Maria, which went on the air in 1964.

Triangle began its exit from broadcasting in 1971, and sold the KFRE stations to Capital Cities Communications. The new owners sold off the AM and FM radio stations as a condition of the purchase and kept the television station, changing its call letters to KFSN-TV on May 1 of that year (the KFRE-TV calls are now used on Fresno's CW affiliate on channel 59; that station is unrelated to the current KFSN-TV).

On March 18, 1985, Capital Cities announced it would purchase ABC. Nearly six months later, on September 9, 1985, KFSN-TV traded network affiliations with KJEO and became an ABC affiliate. The transaction was finalized on January 3, 1986, making channel 30 an ABC owned-and-operated station. It marked the first time a Big Three network owned a UHF television station since NBC sold WNBC (now WVIT) in New Britain, Connecticut, to Plains Television in 1960 (NBC would buy the station back from the original incarnation of Viacom in 1997). In 1996, The Walt Disney Company acquired Capital Cities/ABC.

KFSN-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 30, at noon on June 12, 2009, the official date on which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal relocated from its pre-transition VHF channel 9 to UHF channel 30.

ABC News Now was launched in 2004 on digital subchannels of ABC O&O stations and lasting until January 31, 2005, as the channel ended its experimental phase. The group changed its programming on secondary channels to ABC Plus, a local news and public affairs format. ABC teamed up with AccuWeather to launch a multicast service starting on ABC stations' third subchannel with the second station taking on the service was KFSN-TV in late 2005. On April 27, 2009, KFSN began carrying the Live Well Network on a second digital subchannel digital subchannel.

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