KDLV
KDLV is a television station licensed to Mitchell, South Dakota, in the United States. It broadcasts on virtual channel 5 and operates as a full-time satellite of KDLT-TV, the NBC affiliate licensed to Sioux Falls. The station is owned by Gray Media, which also owns ABC affiliate KSFY-TV, channel 13, in Sioux Falls. Together the stations serve the Sioux Falls–Mitchell television market, covering eastern South Dakota and part of southwestern Minnesota. KDLV exists principally to extend the signal of its parent station into the western part of that market, an area that a Sioux Falls transmitter alone could not reliably reach.
Unlike a station that produces its own separate schedule, KDLV is acknowledged mainly in legal station identifications. Apart from its transmitter facility, it has no physical presence in Mitchell and no separate studios, newsroom or sales office there. Programming, master control and editorial decisions come from the shared operation in Sioux Falls, where KDLT and KSFY are based in Courthouse Square on 1st Avenue South. That arrangement is common in large, sparsely populated markets in the Great Plains, where distances are long, population centres are small, and a network service can only be sustained economically if one newsroom and one programme schedule are distributed through several transmitters.
Relationship to KDLT-TV
To understand KDLV, it is necessary to understand KDLT, because the two licences were not always separate in the way they are today. The channel 5 frequency in Mitchell is the original home of the station that later became KDLT. That station began broadcasting on June 12, 1960, as KORN-TV, taking its call letters from the KORN radio station with which it was then associated. It was an NBC affiliate at the outset and was based in Mitchell, which for its first years shaped both its identity and its limitations. Sioux Falls was the larger city and the commercial centre of eastern South Dakota, yet the station was licensed to and identified with the smaller community to its west.
Over the following decades the Mitchell station gradually became a Sioux Falls station in practice while retaining its channel 5 allocation. In 1998 that evolution was formalised in a technical rearrangement. A new main transmitter on channel 46 in Sioux Falls became KDLT-TV, the principal station, and the established channel 5 facility serving Mitchell and the west was repurposed as KDLV-TV, its full-time satellite. The date associated with KDLV as a distinct call sign is September 8, 1998. The letter V in the call sign represents the Roman numeral five, a reference to the virtual channel it continues to occupy.
Early history as KORN-TV and KXON-TV
The original channel 5 station did not at first broadcast a full service into Sioux Falls. Its position changed in 1969, when it began to serve the Sioux Falls area more directly and switched its primary network affiliation from NBC to ABC. That ABC period lasted until 1983. In 1973 the station separated from KORN radio and changed its call letters to KXON-TV, a name it kept until a further sale and rebranding in 1982, when it became KDLT-TV. The new letters were derived from Dakotaland Television, a reference to its former owners and to the regional identity the station sought to project.
In 1983 the network alignment changed again. ABC moved its affiliation to KSFY-TV, and the channel 5 station picked up NBC instead, returning to the network with which it had started in 1960. It has remained associated with NBC ever since, through both the Mitchell-centred and Sioux Falls-centred phases of its life and through the later creation of KDLV. That continuity is important: although call letters, channel allocations, owners and studio locations all changed, viewers in the Mitchell area have watched NBC programmes on virtual channel 5, in analogue and then digital form, for most of the period since 1983.
The move to Sioux Falls
For much of its history the station faced two linked problems. It was perceived in Sioux Falls as an out-of-town, Mitchell station rather than a true local competitor, and it struggled in audience ratings against its established Sioux Falls rivals. It was, for the better part of its history, described as the lowest-rated of the market's major-network stations. A significant step towards addressing that perception came in 1987, when most operations, including the production of news, moved to Sioux Falls. The licensed community did not change at that point, but the working centre of the station did.
The 1998 rearrangement completed that process. Before it, KDLT was the only major-network station in the market without semi-satellites of its own, putting it at a coverage disadvantage across a wide rural market. By making the new Sioux Falls channel 46 transmitter the main station and turning channel 5 at Mitchell into a satellite, the owners could improve coverage in the east while preserving and effectively strengthening service to the west. KDLV was the product of that logic. It was not created to launch a new, independent programme service for Mitchell; it was created so that the improved Sioux Falls station could continue to be received clearly in and around Mitchell.
Ownership by Red River Broadcasting and Gray Media
Before its present ownership, KDLT and KDLV were owned by Red River Broadcasting. In May 2018 Gray Television, now Gray Media, agreed to acquire KDLT-TV from Red River for 32.5 million dollars in cash. Gray already owned KSFY-TV, the ABC affiliate in Sioux Falls, and had invested in a downtown Sioux Falls facility with additional space intended to accommodate the operations of a second station. The transaction therefore brought the market's ABC and NBC affiliates under one owner, subject to regulatory approval, and it was presented as a combination that would unite KDLT's staff with the resources of the existing Gray operation in South Dakota, which also included stations in Rapid City.
The acquisition took considerably longer than a routine station sale. It was not completed until after federal approval in September 2019, roughly eighteen months after it was announced, because combining two highly rated stations in the same market raised issues under the Federal Communications Commission's local ownership rules. Gray's case rested in part on the public benefits of combining the broadcast facilities, including extending free over-the-air service to viewers who could not previously receive one or other of the services by antenna. The Federal Communications Commission subsequently granted continued authority for KDLV to operate as a satellite of KDLT under the satellite exception to the local television ownership rule, and that satellite status was addressed again in the assignment proceedings connected with the sale.
Dakota News Now
The most visible consequence of the Gray combination for viewers was in news. In January 2020 the news operations of KSFY and KDLT were merged under a single shared brand, Dakota News Now. Instead of two wholly separate newsrooms competing with duplicate resources, the combined operation pooled the journalists of both stations and produced newscasts distributed across the ABC and NBC services. Sioux Falls reporting at the time presented the merger as an unprecedented change in the local market, leaving its major television news services in fewer hands but creating a larger combined team.
Because KDLV simulcasts KDLT, Dakota News Now is the news service received by channel 5 viewers in Mitchell. KDLV does not produce a separate Mitchell newscast, employ a separate Mitchell news team of its own or interrupt the Sioux Falls feed for regular local inserts. Its local value lies instead in reliable reception: it carries the combined newsroom's reporting on South Dakota government, weather, agriculture, sport and community events into homes that are closer to Mitchell, Huron and the west of the market than to the studios in Sioux Falls.
Network programming and subchannels
The main channel carried by KDLV, 5.1, is NBC. That schedule includes NBC's prime-time entertainment, national news, sport and late-night programming, interspersed with the shared local newscasts and syndicated material selected by the Sioux Falls operation. Listings for the combined KDLT service also show Fox programming on the second subchannel, 46.2 for KDLT and 5.2 for KDLV, following the rearrangements that accompanied the Gray combination and the transfer of Fox service in the market. Additional subchannels on the KDLT multiplex have included services such as Antenna TV, Cozi TV and Court TV.
A further feature of the Gray combination is the sharing of multiplex capacity among KDLT, KDLV and their sister station KSFY and its Pierre semi-satellite KPRY-TV. Both of KDLT's principal subchannels have also been carried on KPRY, and programme listings for KDLV have shown KSFY's ABC service and a CW service among the channels available through the combined transmission arrangement. This kind of channel sharing is a practical response to spectrum limits in a market where several network services must be delivered over a small number of full-power transmitters spread over a large area.
Technical information
KDLV broadcasts digitally on UHF channel 26 while displaying virtual channel 5, the number viewers knew from its analogue years. Its analogue predecessor broadcast on VHF channel 5 from 1998, when the KDLV call sign was created, until the United States full-power analogue shutdown in 2009; before 1998 that same channel 5 facility had been the main KORN-TV, KXON-TV and KDLT-TV transmitter. Its transmitter is located at Plankinton, west of Mitchell, a site chosen to serve Mitchell and the western portion of the market rather than the city of licence alone.
Federal Communications Commission records list KDLV's facility identifier as 55375. Its authorised digital effective radiated power is 1,000 kilowatts, with an antenna height above average terrain of 315 metres, about 1,033 feet. Those figures reflect the need to cover long distances over relatively flat agricultural terrain. By comparison, the main KDLT transmitter near Rowena, serving Sioux Falls, operates from a considerably taller structure. The two transmitters together give the NBC service a footprint across the eastern and central parts of the Sioux Falls–Mitchell market that neither could achieve economically on its own.
Coverage and the Mitchell area
Mitchell is best known nationally as the home of the Corn Palace, but in broadcasting terms its importance is geographical. It sits far enough west of Sioux Falls that a single eastern transmitter cannot be relied upon for consistent indoor reception, yet the population around it is too small to support a full, stand-alone major-network station with its own newsroom. A full-power satellite solves that problem. Residents receive exactly the same network programmes, local news and emergency information as viewers in Sioux Falls, while the broadcaster avoids the cost of duplicating an entire station for a comparatively small audience.
KDLV should therefore not be judged as a failed independent station that produces nothing of its own. Producing nothing separate is its intended function. Its licence, transmitter and channel position preserve a service first established on channel 5 in 1960, through changes of network, call sign, owner and technology, and continue to connect Mitchell and the communities around it to the principal NBC and shared Gray Media news operation for eastern South Dakota.
Present status
Today KDLV continues as a full-time satellite of KDLT-TV under Gray Media ownership, sharing studios in Sioux Falls with KDLT and KSFY, carrying NBC on its main channel and participating in the combined Dakota News Now news operation. It has no separate website; its public presence is through the shared Dakota News Now site used by its parent and sister stations. For viewers, the distinction between KDLT on channel 46.1 in Sioux Falls and KDLV on channel 5.1 in Mitchell is largely technical and regulatory. For the market, however, it remains essential, because it is the mechanism by which a station founded in Mitchell in 1960 still serves Mitchell after its centre of gravity, its studios and its main transmitter moved east to Sioux Falls.
