KOKI-TV

KOKI-TV (channel 23) is a television station in Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States, affiliated with the Fox network. It is owned by Rincon Broadcasting Group alongside MyNetworkTV affiliate KMYT-TV (channel 41). The two stations share studios on East 27th Street and South Memorial Drive (near W. G. Skelly Park) in the Audubon neighborhood of southeast Tulsa; KOKI-TV's transmitter is located on South 273rd East Avenue (between 91st Street South and 101st Street South, next to the Muskogee Turnpike) in the western city limits of Coweta.

The UHF channel 23 allocation—which had been dormant since a short-lived attempt to revive its original occupant, KCEB, by original licensee Elfred Beck foundered in September 1967—was contested between two groups that vied to hold the construction permit to build a new television station on the frequency. The first prospective permittee was Wilson Communications, owned by Detroit businessman and Buffalo Bills owner Ralph Wilson, which filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on July 7, 1978. The second applicant, Tulsa 23, Ltd. (originally Channel 23 Tulsa, Ltd.), filed on September 5; that group—led by managing partner Benjamin F. Boddie, Corporate Vice President, Williams Companies. James Lavenstein would go on to serve as KOKI-TV's original general manager—primarily consisted of prominent local corporate executives and community leaders that included Helmerich & Payne CEO Walter H. Helmerich II, and present and former Williams Companies CEOs John H. Williams and Charles P. Williams, respectively (the latter two of whom initiated the redevelopment of over nine square blocks and 1,000,000 square feet (93,000 m²) of new office and retail construction in downtown Tulsa, including the establishment of the Williams Center, the Bank of Oklahoma Tower and the Tulsa Performing Arts Center). The FCC granted the license to the Tulsa 23 venture on December 12, 1979.

KOKI-TV signed on the air on October 26, 1980, a date chosen by Lavenstein at the suggestion of marketing and promotions manager Richard Enderwood, as it coincided with Enderwood's birthday. It was the first commercial television station to sign on in the Tulsa market since NBC affiliate KVOO-TV (channel 2, now KJRH-TV) signed on 26 years earlier on December 5, 1954, and the first independent station to begin operation in a market that, on paper, had a large enough population to provide suitable viewership for an independent station since the early 1970s. The station—which was then branded as "Tulsa 23," accompanied by a futuristic logo in which the numerical "23" was construed as the "LS" in "Tulsa"—originally operated from studio facilities located on East 46th Place (between Memorial Drive and Sheridan Road) in southeast Tulsa, which was fitted with used transmission equipment acquired second-hand from various other American television stations. The station operated on a lean budget, maintaining a general entertainment programming format that featured a mix of classic sitcoms, westerns and drama series, cartoons, and a limited number of sports events and religious programs. The Tulsa 23 partnership purchased programming at low cost and tailored its schedule to appeal to older and rural demographics, leaving much of the higher-rated and more recent syndicated content to be acquired by its network-affiliated competitors, KJRH, CBS affiliate KOTV (channel 6) and ABC affiliate KTUL (channel 8). KOKI was opportunistic with its programming acquisitions on occasion, and picked up broadcast rights to college and major league sporting events.

KOKI heavily emphasized feature films as part of its schedule during this period, typically offering a single film in the afternoon and one to two films during prime time each weekday, and three or four films per day on Saturdays and Sundays. One of the station's regular film presentations was Creature Feature, hosted by Sherman Oaks (the stage name of local comedian Jim Millaway), alongside Gailard Sartain and Jeanne Tripplehorn (then known as Jeanne Summers, who left after the program's first season), both of whom worked as radio hosts for KMOD-FM (97.5) at the time. Showcasing horror and science fiction B movies each Saturday night from October 1982 until October 1985, it featured wraparound segments before and after commercial breaks in which the hosts conducted various skits, often making ridiculous non-sequitur remarks. KOKI would gain a competitor on March 18, 1981, when a joint venture between Green Country Associates and Satellite Syndicated Systems signed on fellow independent KGCT-TV (channel 41, now MyNetworkTV affiliate KMYT-TV) with a mix of syndicated entertainment programs, locally produced news and talk programming in the afternoon, and movies, sports and specials from the In-Home Theatre (IT) subscription service at night. (Within three months of its debut, KGCT transitioned to a hybrid format consisting of daytime general entertainment programming on weekdays and weekend mornings, and IT subscription programming at night throughout the week and on weekend afternoons.) Despite its low-cost approach, KOKI became a major force in the market; this was evidenced in a 1983 study by New York City-based advertising and marketing firm Ogilvy & Mather examining Tulsa's commercial television stations, which showed that KOKI was the only station to increase viewership shares over the two-year period from May 1981 to May 1983, rising from a 6 to a 19 share in early evenings, from a 5 to a 9 in prime time and from a 4 to a 10 share against late newscasts on the three network affiliates, whereas KJRH, KOTV, and KTUL saw steady declines in those same dayparts, which were linked to KOKI's overall growth.

The slogan used to promote its film offerings from the station's sign-on until 1984—"Oklahoma's Movie Star," based on the title of the station's Movie Star film presentations—would be the center of a federal trademark infringement lawsuit that Tulsa 23 Ltd. filed against Home Box Office Inc. in October 1982 over the use of the "We Are Your Movie Star" image campaign implemented by HBO's sister premium service, Cinemax, earlier that year. Judge James Ellison, who presided over the case filed with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma, granted an injunction against Home Box Office in November 1983, on grounds that the Cinemax campaign had infringed upon KOKI's trademark. HBO appealed the ruling in the Denver-based Tenth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which upheld Ellison's injunction order in a ruling handed down on December 9, forcing Cinemax to discontinue the campaign and begin developing a replacement marketing initiative ("We're Taking You to the Stars," which Cinemax used as its image campaign slogan until 1986).

Partly because of its status as the strongest of the market's two independent stations, in early August 1986, in advance of the network's launch, News Corporation announced that it had reached an agreement with Tulsa 23 Ltd., in which KOKI-TV was named the Tulsa charter affiliate of the Fox Broadcasting Company.

KOKI-TV affiliated with Fox when the fledgling network began programming on October 9, 1986, with the premiere of late-night talk show The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers. Though it was technically a network affiliate, Channel 23 continued to be programmed as a de facto independent station as Fox offered a limited schedule of programming during the network's early years of operation. Even after the network's programming expanded with the launch of a three-hour Sunday night lineup in April 1987, Fox offered prime time programs exclusively on weekend evenings until September 1989, when it began a five-year expansion towards a nightly prime time schedule. (It would take seven years for Fox to offer prime time programs on all seven nights of the week, completing the expansion with the rollout of its Monday night lineup in January 1993.) Until the network's expansion was completed, KOKI continued to air a movie at 7 p.m. on nights when the network did not offer any programming. In 1988, the station moved its operations into a low-rise office building on East 54th Street and South Yale Avenue (near LaFortune Park) in southeast Tulsa, which was named Fox Plaza.

After trying for several years to offload KOKI-TV, the Tulsa 23 partnership secured a willing buyer on March 6, 1989, when it reached an agreement to sell the station to San Antonio, Texas–based Clear Channel Television for $6.075 million. Citing that KOKI had not generated a profit for some time as a result of an economic downturn spurred by an oil exploration slump in the region during the 1980s, division parent Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia)—which had owned KMOD-FM and KAKC (1300 AM) since the company, as San Antonio Broadcasting Corp., acquired the two radio stations from Unicorn Inc. in 1973—applied for a "failing station" waiver of FCC ownership rules that then prohibited common ownership of television and radio stations in the same market on the basis that the combined ownership would provide KOKI with needed financial support to remain operational and expand its public affairs programming. The sale and cross-ownership waiver received FCC approval on November 17, 1989; the transaction was finalized in late February 1990. (KOKI would gain additional radio sisters when Clear Channel purchased KQLL-AM-FM [1430, now KTBZ, and 106.1, now KTGX] and KOAS [92.1 FM, now KTBT] from Federated Media for $15.4 million in April 1996; as the Telecommunications Act eliminated the radio-television cross-ownership restrictions, the company acquired the two stations without amending the earlier waiver.)