KNBC

KNBC (channel 4) is a television station in Los Angeles, California, United States. It is the West Coast flagship station of the NBC television network, owned and operated through its NBC Owned Television Stations division. Under common ownership with Corona-licensed Telemundo outlet KVEA (channel 52), the two stations share studio facilities at the Brokaw News Center in the northwest corner of the Universal Studios Hollywood lot off Lankershim Boulevard in Universal City; KNBC's transmitter is located on Mount Wilson.

Channel 4 first went on the air as KNBH (standing for "NBC Hollywood") on January 16, 1949. It was the second-to-last VHF station in Los Angeles to debut, and the last of NBC's five original owned-and-operated stations to sign on. Unlike the other four, KNBH was the only NBC-owned television station that did not benefit from having a sister radio station. Though the NBC Radio Network had long been affiliated with KFI in Los Angeles, that relationship did not extend into television when KFI-TV (channel 9, now KCAL-TV) signed on in August 1948. When KNBH signed on, it marked the debut of NBC programs on the West Coast. Channel 4 originally broadcast from the NBC Radio City Studios on Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street in Hollywood.

The station changed its callsign to KRCA (for NBC's then-parent company, the Radio Corporation of America) on October 18, 1954. The call letters were changed again on November 11, 1962, when NBC moved the KNBC identity from its San Francisco radio station (which became KNBR) and applied it to channel 4 in Los Angeles. That call letter change coincided with the station's physical relocation from NBC Radio City to the network's color broadcast studio facility in suburban Burbank. NBC Color City, as it was then known, had been in operation since March 1955, and was at least four to five times larger than Radio City, and could easily accommodate KNBC's locally produced studio programming. NBC Radio's West Coast operations eventually followed channel 4 to Burbank not too long after.

The station officially modified its callsign to KNBC-TV in August 1986, shortly after NBC and RCA were purchased by General Electric; the -TV suffix was dropped effective September 6, 1995.

On October 11, 2007, NBCUniversal announced that it would put its Burbank studios up for sale and construct a new, all-digital facility near the Universal Studios Hollywood backlot in Universal City, to merge all of NBCUniversal's West Coast operations (including KNBC, KVEA and NBC News' Los Angeles bureau) into one area. The studio opened on February 1, 2014. Shortly thereafter, NBCUniversal named the new broadcast center in honor of former KNBC and NBC News anchor/reporter Tom Brokaw, christened the Brokaw News Center.

In fall 2007 with the rollout of digital broadcasting, the station began airing a 24/7 newschannel News Raw on the .2 subchannel.

KNBC ended regular programming on its analog signal, over VHF channel 4, on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 36, using virtual channel 4. Since the station qualified for the nightlight clause in the DTV Delay Act, it was required to keep its analog signal on for two weeks from June 12 to 26, 2009 to inform viewers of the digital television transition, consisting of a loop of digital transition public service announcements, while the digital channel was used for normal programming.

On January 1, 2014, Universal Sports transitioned into a cable- and satellite-exclusive service, causing its affiliates (such as KNBC) to replace the network and remove the channel from their digital signals entirely.