About KOFY-TV

KOFY-TV

KOFY-TV, channel 20, is a television station licensed to San Francisco, California, serving the San Francisco–Oakland–San Jose market as an affiliate of the Spanish-language network Estrella TV. It is owned by CNZ Communications, LLC, through Stryker Media 2, LLC, alongside Class A station KCNZ-CD and low-power KMPX-LD, with which it shares transmitter facilities on San Bruno Mountain. It broadcasts digitally on channel 21 in a sharing arrangement, with 15 kilowatts of power and a height above average terrain of 377.2 metres, under FCC facility ID 51189.

Channel 20 is one of the Bay Area's most storied independents. It began in 1968 as KEMO-TV, became KTZO under flamboyant owner James Gabbert in 1980, took the KOFY-TV name — pronounced like coffee — in 1986, joined The WB as KBWB in 1998, reclaimed the KOFY name in 2008, and spent years as a retro-flavoured independent before passing to CNZ Communications and a sequence of diginet affiliations.

A note on names is essential. The KEMO-TV call sign that channel 20 used from 1968 to 1980 now belongs to a completely different station: the channel 50 station licensed to Fremont, formerly KFTY of Santa Rosa, which adopted the KEMO-TV call letters in 2011. The two stations share nothing but a recycled call sign, and their histories should not be merged.

An Unbuilt Permit: KBAY-TV

The construction permit for San Francisco channel 20 was first awarded on March 11, 1953, to Lawrence A. Harvey, who called it KBAY-TV. Harvey, a Torrance industrialist who also chased permits in Los Angeles and Salem, Oregon, announced an apparent plan to sign on that September, but the station was never built. In January 1955 the unbuilt permit passed for no consideration to Bay Television, owned by Leonard and Lily Averett, and in 1957 it was acquired by theatre owner Sherrill Corwin for the $1,750 the Averetts had spent.

Corwin held the permit, which briefly used the call letters KEZE-TV between 1961 and 1963, without building. In late 1964 he agreed to sell to the Overmyer Communications Company, owned by Daniel H. Overmyer, founder of the short-lived Overmyer Network. The sale was approved after a hearing in October 1965. In 1966 the project moved its planned transmitter to Mount Sutro and took the call sign KEMO-TV, derived from Overmyer's son, Edward Manning Overmyer.

KEMO-TV Signs On, 1968

KEMO-TV finally signed on on April 1, 1968, fifteen years after the permit was issued. Overmyer had sold an 80 percent interest in the permit to U.S. Communications Corporation of Philadelphia in March 1967, with Corwin retaining 20 percent; FCC approval came on December 8, 1967. U.S. Communications operated sister UHF stations in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.

The first KEMO-TV showed conventional independent fare plus distinctive touches: an art-film strand called The Adults Only Movie, named for the films' lack of appeal to children rather than any adult content, and Japanese live-action programmes and cartoons dubbed into English, including Speed Racer, Ultraman, 8 Man and Prince Planet. The mixture of local and syndicated programming kept the station going for exactly three years: it powered down at midnight on March 31, 1971, reportedly to avoid the next month's electricity bill from PG&E.

The Leon Crosby Years

Leon Crosby, former owner of San Francisco radio station KMPX-FM, bought the dark station later in 1971, and KEMO-TV returned to the air on February 4, 1972. Crosby's eclectic schedule included Filipino programmes such as Solesvida and the Amapola Presents Show, co-hosted by Amapola and Ness Aquino, reflecting San Francisco's communities long before multicultural broadcasting became a recognised format.

From 1972 to 1980 the typical KEMO day combined stock-market programming in the morning, religious programmes at midday, Spanish-language programmes in the afternoon and evening, and low-budget films overnight, hosted for a time by carpet-store owner Leon Heskett. Crosby also revived the dark Pittsburgh UHF station WPGH-TV in 1974. His KEMO signed off for the last time on September 30, 1980, making way for a sale that would define channel 20 for the next eighteen years.

James Gabbert and KTZO

James Gabbert's Pacific FM, also called FM Broadcasting, bought KEMO-TV and changed its call sign to KTZO in October 1980. Gabbert, a Stanford-trained engineer who had founded KPEN-FM, later KIOI or K-101, was one of California's most inventive broadcasters, and he treated TV 20 as a personality station. KTZO promoted a powerful five-million-watt signal as the most powerful television station in Northern California, added true stereo sound in the mid-1980s, and filled its breaks with idiosyncratic local touches, most famously the station dogs shown in its identifications.

In 1986 Gabbert acquired Hispanic radio station KOFY, 1050 AM, and transferred its call letters to the television station, which became KOFY-TV on March 1, 1986; the name was pronounced coffee and was chosen, Gabbert explained, because listeners remembered it. Television and radio shared a building. KOFY-TV's schedule in this era mixed syndicated programmes with network shows the bigger affiliates passed on, including NBC daytime game shows and CBS's The Price Is Right at times, plus local programmes and, in the early 1990s, a short-lived local newscast. Gabbert was named California Broadcaster of the Year in 1994.

The WB and KBWB

In 1994 Warner Bros. approached Gabbert, and KOFY-TV became the Bay Area affiliate of the new WB Television Network when it launched in January 1995. Network affiliation raised the station's profile and its value. In 1998 Gabbert and his partners left broadcasting: Granite Broadcasting acquired Pacific FM and KOFY-TV in a deal closed on July 20, 1998, paying about $143.8 million in cash for the company, plus $30 million to the principal shareholders for non-compete agreements.

Granite renamed the station KBWB on September 14, 1998, to align it with The WB. The same day it relaunched a 10 p.m. newscast, WB20 News at 10, produced by KNTV; a morning newscast from KNTV followed in 2000, and the evening programme became The WB Primetime News at 10. The arrangement ended in April 2002, after KNTV became the market's NBC owned station. KBWB continued as The WB affiliate until the network closed in 2006, building a stronger syndicated inventory to compete with the Bay Area's other independents.

Independent Again: The Return of KOFY

The CW, formed from The WB and UPN in 2006, chose San Francisco's existing UPN station, so KBWB became an independent. On October 8, 2008, at 10 p.m., it reverted to the KOFY-TV call sign, marking the change with a ten-minute documentary about James Gabbert and the station's history, followed by two hours of Mork & Mindy. The revival of the name acknowledged that, for Bay Area viewers, channel 20's identity came from the Gabbert era rather than from any network.

As an independent, KOFY-TV built a schedule of talk, court and reality shows, sitcoms and films, and leaned into local nostalgia with programmes such as its Dance Party and horror strand Creepy KOFY Movie Time. It carried selected University of San Francisco basketball games in the 1990s tradition of local sports, and on April 3, 2013, it aired its first baseball telecast, an Oakland Athletics game against Seattle produced by Comcast SportsNet Bay Area. From 2013, KGO-TV's ABC7 news was also seen on the station in an 11:30 p.m. slot and other arrangements, and after 2018 the station kept studio space at KGO's North Waterfront building, having left its longtime Marin Street studios in Bayview–Hunters Point.

MeTV, Azteca and the Subchannel Years

KOFY-TV was an early user of digital subchannels for network services. On July 1, 2007, it began carrying the Spanish-language network Azteca América on subchannel 20.4, replacing KTNC-TV as the Bay Area affiliate. In October 2011 it agreed to carry MeTV, the classic-television network, on subchannel 20.2, and MeTV became a large part of the station's public identity in the 2010s, alongside its independent main channel.

The Azteca chapter links to the KEMO-TV name confusion. In 2011 the Santa Rosa station KFTY, channel 50, was sold with the intention of taking the Azteca affiliation; on September 29, 2011, it dropped MeTV and adopted the call sign KEMO-TV, reusing the letters channel 20 had discarded in 1980. That station, now licensed to Fremont, is a separate licence with its own history dating to 1981, and none of KOFY-TV's pre-1980 history belongs to it.

Digital Transition and Spectrum Sharing

KOFY-TV shut down its analog signal on channel 20 on June 12, 2009, the national transition date. Its digital signal stayed on its pre-transition channel 19, displaying virtual channel 20. In the spectrum repack the station moved to channel 28 between 2018 and 2020, and it now shares a channel — digital channel 21 — with its CNZ sister stations KCNZ-CD and KMPX-LD from San Bruno Mountain.

Sharing explains the station's modest listed power of 15 kilowatts: in a shared arrangement the available capacity is divided among licences. The station's signal is also relayed by a low-power digital translator, K27EE-D in Ukiah, extending channel 20 into Mendocino County.

CNZ Ownership: Grit, Merit and Estrella

Granite's successor interests sold the station to CNZ Communications, and the economics of a stand-alone independent tightened. On March 18, 2022, KOFY announced it would close its studio operation on April 15, 2022, and become an affiliate of Grit, the western and action diginet, on its main channel. The change ended the station's locally programmed independent schedule after more than fifty years, though its branding and subchannels continued.

In April 2024 the main channel switched to Merit TV, the network associated with Dr. Phil McGraw's Merit Street, and Grit moved to subchannel 20.2. Following Merit's difficulties, channel 20.1 took its present affiliation, Estrella TV, the Spanish-language network owned by Estrella Media, with Grit's period on the station ending in 2026 according to current listings. The result is a full circle of a kind: a station that carried Spanish programmes under Leon Crosby in the 1970s is once again a Spanish-language outlet, now as a network affiliate rather than a brokered independent.

KOFY-TV Today

Today KOFY-TV operates with no conventional local studio operation of its own, from space associated with KGO-TV, transmitting from San Bruno Mountain under CNZ Communications. Its subchannels carry a rotating set of diginet services alongside the Estrella TV main channel, and its sister stations KCNZ-CD and KMPX-LD carry services such as LATV and Jewelry TV.

For WorldNM, the key points are the San Francisco licence, the April 1, 1968, sign-on as KEMO-TV, the Gabbert era that gave the station its enduring name, and the clear boundary with the present Fremont KEMO-TV. Channel 20's history belongs to San Francisco broadcasting from KBAY's unbuilt 1953 permit to today's Estrella TV affiliate — a single licence with an unusually colourful past.