KMTW
KMTW is a television station licensed to Hutchinson, Kansas, in the United States, serving the Wichita television market on virtual channel 36. It airs programming from Roar, a digital multicast entertainment network owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group. The station is owned by Mercury Broadcasting Company, which maintains a local marketing agreement with Sinclair, the owner of KSAS-TV, channel 24, a dual affiliate of Fox and MyNetworkTV in Wichita. Under that agreement Sinclair provides certain services to KMTW. The two stations share studios on North West Street in northwestern Wichita, and KMTW's transmitter is in rural southwestern Harvey County, on the town limits of Halstead.
The batch listing under which this profile was prepared described KMTW by the identity it held for fifteen years, as the Wichita affiliate of MyNetworkTV operated alongside Fox affiliate KSAS-TV. That description explains its call letters — Kansas MyNetworkTV Wichita — but it is no longer the station's main affiliation. MyNetworkTV programming moved within the Sinclair-operated Wichita group, and channel 36's main service passed first to the multicast network Dabl and then to Roar. KMTW's history is therefore a history of the smaller networks of American television: it signed on for UPN in 2001, became a founding-era MyNetworkTV affiliate in 2006, and in its third decade became a vehicle for its operator's own multicast services.
Founding and sign-on as KSCC
The station was founded on June 27, 1997. Before it reached the air it held two earlier call signs: KAWJ from 1997 to 1998, and then KSCC from 1998, the letters under which it launched. Some listings give the sign-on date as January 5, 2001, and others as January 6, 2001; under either dating, the station began broadcasting in the first week of January 2001 in analogue on UHF channel 36, the number it still uses as its virtual channel.
At sign-on, as KSCC, the station was owned by Paramount Stations Group, then a subsidiary of Viacom and the station group built around the UPN network. Contemporary accounts of the station noted that ownership by a major network station group was a rarity for a market of Wichita's size, where additional UHF stations were more commonly held by smaller companies. The reason was straightforward: the station had been created to carry UPN, the network Paramount operated, and Wichita otherwise lacked a full-time UPN outlet of its own. Channel 36's first affiliation, from 2001 to 2006, was therefore UPN, supplemented by syndicated programmes in the hours the network did not fill.
Sale to Mercury Broadcasting and the KSAS agreement
In late 2001, during its first year on air, Viacom sold the station to Mercury Broadcasting Company. Mercury has remained the licensee and owner of channel 36 ever since, through all of the affiliation and operator changes that followed. Two years after the purchase, in 2003, the operations of the station were taken over by KSAS-TV under a local marketing agreement. KSAS was then owned by Clear Channel Communications. Under the agreement the channel 36 operation moved into KSAS's facility, beginning the shared existence that the two stations still have today in the studios on North West Street in Wichita.
A local marketing agreement of this kind allows the operator of one station to provide programming, sales and administrative services to another station that it does not own. In Wichita the arrangement paired the market's Fox affiliate with a UPN and later MyNetworkTV station, giving advertisers a combined sale and giving channel 36 access to an established local operation instead of maintaining a complete separate staff. The number of full-power stations in the market was not normally enough to permit the two to be combined as an owned duopoly without a waiver, and the agreements governing Wichita television therefore developed around the agreement rather than around common ownership of the two licences.
From UPN to MyNetworkTV and the KMTW call letters
On January 24, 2006, the Warner Bros. unit of Time Warner and CBS Corporation announced that The WB and UPN would be shut down and their programming combined into a new network, The CW. On February 22, 2006, News Corporation announced a different new network, MyNetworkTV, to be operated by Fox Television Stations and its syndication arm. MyNetworkTV was created both to compete with The CW and to give former UPN and WB stations that had not been chosen as CW affiliates an alternative to becoming independent stations.
Wichita's CW affiliation went to the market's WB affiliate, channel 33, now KSCW-DT. Channel 36 was announced on June 15, 2006, as Wichita's charter affiliate for MyNetworkTV, and on August 1, 2006, it changed its call letters from KSCC to KMTW to reflect the new affiliation. It joined MyNetworkTV when the network launched on September 5, 2006. As a MyNetworkTV station it was branded My TV Wichita, and its new call letters, retained ever since, spelled out the identity of that period: Kansas, MyNetworkTV, Wichita. The station carried MyNetworkTV's prime-time service — which later evolved from its original programme model into a schedule built largely around network-distributed drama repeats — along with syndicated programmes and services shared with KSAS.
Clear Channel, Newport and Sinclair as operators
The operator standing behind KMTW changed three times while Mercury remained its owner. On April 20, 2007, Clear Channel agreed to sell its television stations, including KSAS and its agreement with KMTW, to Newport Television, a company controlled by the private equity firm Providence Equity Partners. That sale was finalised on March 14, 2008, and Newport became the operator of both Wichita stations.
On July 19, 2012, Newport Television announced the sale of KSAS-TV, together with the KMTW agreement, to Sinclair Broadcast Group, as part of a larger group transaction involving twenty-two stations sold among Sinclair, Nexstar and Cox, valued in total at an estimated one billion dollars. The transaction included an option for Sinclair to acquire KMTW outright from Mercury Broadcasting if the Federal Communications Commission relaxed its ownership rules to permit such a combination in a market of Wichita's size. The purchase of KSAS and the transfer of the KMTW agreement were completed on December 3, 2012. Sinclair has been KMTW's operator since that date, and it remains so under the local marketing agreement recorded in current station listings.
Programming in the MyNetworkTV years
During its MyNetworkTV years KMTW's main channel combined the network's evening service with syndicated programming, and its digital multiplex added further services, which in that period included GetTV on a subchannel. On cable in the Wichita area the station was carried on Cox Communications channel 6 and on AT&T U-verse channel 36, with high-definition carriage on the corresponding HD tiers — a reminder that for a UHF station licensed to Hutchinson rather than Wichita itself, cable position was at least as important to its audience as its over-the-air channel number.
News on channel 36 was limited and was a product of the shared operation rather than of a separate KMTW newsroom. The Wichita operation's news effort centred on KSAS, the Fox affiliate, which for a period had its 9 p.m. newscast produced under news share arrangements with other Wichita stations before production responsibilities changed again in 2012. KMTW itself was positioned as an entertainment station in the pairing: Fox programmes and news on channel 24, MyNetworkTV and syndicated entertainment on channel 36, with common studios, sales and technical services behind both.
Digital transition and technical information
KMTW's analogue signal broadcast on UHF channel 36 from 2001 until the national full-power analogue shutdown in 2009. Its digital signal uses UHF channel 35, with receivers displaying virtual channel 36. Current listings also identify the station as an ATSC 3.0 station, part of the newer generation of broadcast transmission being introduced market by market in the United States, in which a designated station hosts next-generation broadcasts while its own services continue to be available to existing receivers through partner stations. A listing for a sister market station records a KMTW subchannel service, Charge! on 36.3, as broadcast on behalf of another station — an example of the hosting arrangements that accompany that standard.
The Federal Communications Commission lists KMTW's facility identifier as 77063. Its authorised digital effective radiated power is 1,000 kilowatts, the maximum commonly authorised for a UHF station, with an antenna height above average terrain of 310 metres, about 1,017 feet. The transmitter site in southwestern Harvey County near Halstead is a compromise location serving both the city of licence, Hutchinson, to the northwest of Wichita, and the larger Wichita metropolitan audience to the southeast. Licensing a Wichita-market station to Hutchinson follows a pattern set by an earlier Hutchinson station in the market and reflects the historic allocation of channels in central Kansas.
From MyNetworkTV to Dabl and Roar
KMTW's affiliation record lists MyNetworkTV from 2006 to 2021. In 2021 the main channel changed to Dabl, a multicast network built around lifestyle and factual programming, and MyNetworkTV's Wichita service continued within the group on KSAS-TV, which current listings describe as a dual Fox and MyNetworkTV affiliate. Channel 36 thus ceased to be the network's primary home in Wichita after fifteen years, even though its call letters continued to advertise that role.
The Dabl period lasted from 2021 to 2025. Current station listings show KMTW's primary affiliation as Roar, the Sinclair multicast entertainment service known previously under the TBD name. The sequence — UPN from 2001 to 2006, MyNetworkTV from 2006 to 2021, Dabl from 2021 to 2025 and Roar thereafter — gives channel 36 a clear four-part history. Each change was driven not by a local decision in Wichita but by national changes in the smaller-network business: the merger of UPN into The CW, the creation of MyNetworkTV to absorb the displaced affiliates, and finally the strategy of large station groups such as Sinclair to programme secondary stations with multicast networks they themselves own and control.
Relationship to Hutchinson and Wichita
KMTW is licensed to Hutchinson but is, in every practical sense, a Wichita station. Its studios, its operating partner, its advertising market and most of its audience are in Wichita, while Hutchinson is the community named on its licence and one of the communities within its coverage area. That distinction is common in American broadcasting, where channel allocations were historically distributed among the smaller cities of a region even as population and commerce concentrated in the largest city. The station is required to serve its city of licence, and its transmitter position ensures Hutchinson receives its signal, but its programme service is planned for the combined Hutchinson–Wichita market as a whole.
For viewers, the station's separate identity has always rested on its channel position and programme schedule rather than on a separate local presence. It has no separate website of its own in its current form comparable to an independent station's; its public identity has been expressed through its network branding of the period — My TV Wichita in the MyNetworkTV years — and through the shared Wichita operation it belongs to.
Present status
Today KMTW remains a Mercury Broadcasting station operated by Sinclair Broadcast Group under a local marketing agreement, sharing studios on North West Street in Wichita with KSAS-TV, broadcasting digitally on channel 35 with virtual channel 36, and carrying Roar on its main channel. Its licence preserves an additional full-power television service for the Hutchinson–Wichita market that has, in succession, introduced Wichita viewers to UPN, carried MyNetworkTV from that network's first day in 2006, and now distributes its operator's multicast programming. Few stations illustrate more clearly how the second tier of American network television has changed since the turn of the century than this channel 36 station whose call letters still name a network it no longer primarily carries.
