KECY
KECY-TV (channel 9) is a television station licensed to El Centro, California, United States, serving the Yuma, Arizona-El Centro, California market. Its primary channel is affiliated with Fox, with MyNetworkTV programming carried on a secondary basis, while its digital subchannels carry ABC, The CW Plus and Telemundo. It is owned by the News-Press & Gazette Company (NPG) and shares studios on South 4th Avenue in downtown Yuma, Arizona, with an advertising sales office on West Main Street in El Centro. Its transmitter is located in the Chocolate Mountains in Imperial County, California.
A cross-border, two-state market
The Yuma-El Centro market is unusual in American television. It spans two states, California's Imperial Valley and southwestern Arizona around Yuma, and sits on the border with Mexico. El Centro is the station's city of license, but Yuma is the market's other population centre and the place where KECY's studios are located. The station's call sign itself stands for El Centro and Yuma. The arrangement reflects the economics of a small desert market, ranked well outside the largest hundred American markets, in which a single group of stations can efficiently provide all of the major network services to viewers on both sides of the state line. KECY is at the centre of that structure, carrying four network affiliations on one licence.
Allocation of channel 9 and the long road to sign-on
On April 18, 1962, the Federal Communications Commission signed an agreement with Mexico, effective that September, that allowed channels 7 and 9 to be allocated to El Centro and gave the Imperial Valley its first opportunity for local VHF television. Competing applications followed. The FCC approved channel 9 for the station that would become KECC-TV on April 10, 1963, and ABC agreed to affiliate with it that September. Construction was then delayed for years. The owner of Yuma station KIVA appealed against the FCC decision, arguing that the El Centro and Yuma markets were too small to support multiple local stations. The FCC turned down that challenge in July 1963 and a federal appeals court later ruled in favour of the El Centro stations, but even after the legal dispute ended the new station received a number of extensions and did not reach the air in the mid-1960s.
Sign-on as KECC-TV and the network years
The station finally signed on on December 11, 1968, as KECC-TV. Its affiliation history in its first decades moved repeatedly between two networks. It was a primary ABC affiliate from 1968 to 1970, then a CBS affiliate from 1970 to 1982, then ABC again from 1982 to 1985, and then CBS again from 1985 to 1994. In 1981 the station changed its call letters from KECC-TV to KECY-TV, the call sign it retains. For many years its studios were on Main Street in El Centro in a former Bank of America building, and it produced a local newscast known as News 9 from 1968 until 1993, during its years as a CBS affiliate. In 1990 it signed on a low-power relay in the Palm Springs area, K40DB, which extended CBS programming toward the Coachella Valley and later developed into a separate Fox affiliate for Palm Desert, KDFX.
The switch to Fox in 1994
In April 1994 KECY announced that it would switch to Fox, and the change took place that September. CBS programming moved to KSWT (channel 13), the station now operating as KYMA-DT. The move made KECY one of the early CBS affiliates in the country to leave that network for Fox during the period of affiliation realignment that followed Fox's acquisition of National Football League rights. Two sister stations in other markets controlled by the same ownership also switched to Fox that year. Before the switch, Fox viewers in the market had depended on cable carriage of stations from San Diego or Phoenix. From 1995 KECY also carried UPN programming on a secondary basis, an arrangement that lasted until UPN closed in 2006, when MyNetworkTV took a similar secondary place in its schedule.
Pacific Media, the management agreement and the NPG purchase
KECY was sold to Pacific Media Corporation in the mid-1990s. In March 1997 Pacific Media entered a local marketing agreement under which the station would be managed by another operator; the agreement was transferred the following month to a subsidiary associated with the News-Press & Gazette Company of St. Joseph, Missouri. Lambert Broadcasting was involved in splitting the Palm Desert relay off as its own Fox affiliate during this period. The management arrangement lasted for more than a decade. In November 2007, with time running out on the agreement, NPG moved to buy KECY and the Palm Desert station outright for two million dollars, and the FCC approved the sale in May 2008. NPG has owned KECY since then, through its NPG of Yuma-El Centro subsidiary.
Digital multicasting brings ABC, The CW and Telemundo
Digital television transformed KECY from a single-network station into the market's multi-network hub. ABC returned to the station on January 1, 2007, this time on digital subchannel 9.2, under an affiliation agreement announced by ABC with NPG; the service was branded ABC 5, after its cable channel position in Yuma and Imperial counties. KECY began broadcasting in high definition in early 2009, the first station in the market to do so, carrying Fox prime time and Fox Sports in high definition. The CW moved to KECY in March 2010 after KSWT dropped the network, and was placed on channel 9.3, branded Desert CW6, while the simulcast of low-power Telemundo affiliate KESE-LP, branded Telemundo 3, moved to 9.4. In November 2017 the ABC 5 feed was upgraded to 720p high definition, and in January 2018 the Telemundo 3 simulcast on 9.4 was also upgraded to 720p. The CW service was upgraded to widescreen standard definition, as bandwidth limits prevented three simultaneous high-definition entertainment feeds alongside the Telemundo simulcast. DirecTV also invested in a direct fibre link in early 2011 that allowed KECY to exchange high-definition programming with DirecTV's facilities in Los Angeles.
Consolidation with KYMA and KSWT
On July 2, 2014, NPG announced a resource sharing agreement with Blackhawk Broadcasting, owner of KSWT and KYMA, that gave NPG control of the big four network affiliates in the Yuma-El Centro market. Employees of KSWT and KYMA, other than sales staff, became employees of NPG, and the stations relocated to KECY's Yuma studios within five months. Viewers reported signal and synchronization problems in the weeks after the consolidation, which the stations' chief engineer attributed to the complexity of combining network receiving equipment that had previously been operated from different locations. The underlying stations later changed again: the program streams of the former KYMA and KSWT were merged onto the present KYMA-DT (channels 11 and 13), a dual CBS and NBC affiliate, as a condition of an acquisition in 2019. KECY is now co-managed with that station and is a sister station to KYMA-DT and to low-power Telemundo affiliate KESE-LD (channel 35).
News operation
For a long period after its original News 9 ended in 1993, KECY produced no local news of its own. News returned in March 2012, when the station established a news operation branded KECY Fox 9 News and KECY ABC 5 News. After the 2014 consolidation, news gathering for the market's stations was combined under NPG in Yuma. KECY's newscasts are now presented under the News 11 branding shared with KYMA, as News 11 on Fox 9 and News 11 on ABC 5. The combined operation provides local news for the Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC services in the market from the South 4th Avenue studios in Yuma, with El Centro served through the West Main Street sales office and Imperial Valley news coverage.
Technical information
KECY-TV broadcasts on digital VHF channel 9, which is also its virtual channel, a continuity that few stations retained through the digital transition. It broadcast in analog on VHF channel 9 from 1968 to 2009 and used digital channel 48 from 2004 to 2009 before returning its digital signal to channel 9. Its facility ID is 51208. It operates with an effective radiated power of 50 kilowatts from an antenna 478 metres above average terrain in the Chocolate Mountains, at 33 degrees 3 minutes 19.1 seconds north and 114 degrees 49 minutes 46.9 seconds west. The mountain site gives the signal reach across the Imperial Valley and into the Yuma area.
Significance
KECY illustrates how a small-market station can carry a disproportionate civic role. Licensed to El Centro, based in Yuma, and broadcasting from a desert mountain range, it delivers Fox, ABC, The CW and Telemundo programming to a two-state border market on a single transmitter, and its corporate group provides the market's CBS and NBC services and its local news. Its long delay before sign-on, its repeated moves between ABC and CBS, its 1994 switch to Fox and its reinvention as a four-network digital station form a concise history of the economic pressures that have shaped American local television outside the largest cities.
