About KUBD

KUBD

KUBD (channels 2 and 5) is a television station in Ketchikan, Alaska, United States, affiliated with CBS and owned by Gray Media. It operates as a full-time satellite of KYEX-LD (channel 5), the low-power station licensed to Juneau, relaying that station's CBS service — itself a relay of Anchorage station KAUU — into Ketchikan, Alaska's first city and the southern gateway of Southeast Alaska. KUBD's transmitter is located in downtown Ketchikan, and on cable the station is available on channel 4 on both GCI and KPU CommVision, the municipal system owned by the City of Ketchikan. The station went on the air in 1995 as a Trinity Broadcasting Network affiliate, passed through Pax to become Southeast Alaska's CBS outlet in 2000, and has been sold with its sister stations twice — to GCI's Denali Media Holdings in 2014 and onward into the Gray group in 2020 — while its satellite function has kept CBS continuously in front of Ketchikan viewers.

Sign-on as KNEB-TV in 1995

KUBD went on the air on April 1, 1995, as KNEB-TV, operating on analog VHF channel 4. The station arrived late in Ketchikan's television history — a small, remote market at the southern end of the Alaska Panhandle — and it did not begin as a network affiliate in the conventional sense. Its original affiliation was with TBN, the Trinity Broadcasting Network's religious service. In 1998 two things changed together: the station's call letters became KUBD, and its affiliation switched to Pax, the network launched that year by Paxson Communications and known today as Ion Television. The KUBD identity and the Pax schedule carried the station to the end of the decade, at which point its owners — the Ketchikan Television organization — repositioned it toward the affiliation that would define it.

Joining CBS in 2000

In 2000, KUBD joined CBS. The change transformed the station's importance to its community: it became Ketchikan's source of a major network's full service — prime-time entertainment, national news, and the network's sports — delivered over the air by a local license. KUBD did not drop its previous affiliation immediately; it continued a secondary affiliation with Pax for some time after joining CBS, a common arrangement for small-market stations filling their schedules from two suppliers. The station also served for a period as the nominal parent of a low-power namesake, KUBD-LP on channel 11 in Kodiak, which carried CBS and Ion programming to that island community under Ketchikan TV ownership until its license was canceled by the FCC on July 20, 2021, after it failed to obtain a digital license before the July 13 deadline. The Ketchikan station itself made its digital move early: it launched its digital signal in early 2006 on channel 13.

A unique market: cable, must-carry and KUBD

KUBD's regulatory history reveals how unusual Ketchikan is as a television market. In FCC proceedings over the station's 2014 sale, the municipal cable operator KPU described Ketchikan as a unique market in which over-the-air reception of local broadcast stations is virtually nonexistent and cable penetration is over 90 percent. In that environment, KPU argued, KUBD was the only major network affiliate entitled to full must-carry, retransmission consent and network non-duplication protection in Ketchikan — the community's exclusive protected source of CBS network programming. KPU opposed aspects of the sale to Denali Media, a subsidiary of its far larger cable competitor GCI, arguing that common ownership of the station and the rival cable system could let GCI foreclose KPU's access to KUBD or raise its costs. The FCC's handling of the assignment (DA 14-662) is an unusually complete public record of the station's position: a tiny broadcaster whose value lies not in its transmitter — a fraction of a kilowatt in downtown Ketchikan — but in its exclusive network rights inside a nearly fully cabled town.

The CBS Southeast trio

KUBD did not operate alone. Together with KTNL-TV in Sitka and low-power KXLJ-LD in Juneau, it formed the group of CBS affiliates for Southeast Alaska, branded collectively as CBS Southeast, under Ketchikan Television LLC — a company based in Evergreen, Colorado, whose principals also operated KDMD in Anchorage. The three stations covered the Panhandle's three principal communities with CBS service, in a region where Juneau's cable systems had historically imported Seattle's KIRO-TV for CBS programming instead, and where, before KXLJ-LD's establishment, KTNL and KUBD had served as the default over-the-air CBS affiliates for the entire Southeast. Within the trio, Ketchikan's station was the southern anchor, serving the first Alaskan community reached from the continental United States.

Sale to Denali Media (2013–2014)

On December 9, 2013, Ketchikan TV filed to sell KUBD, along with KTNL-TV in Sitka and KXLJ-LD in Juneau, to Denali Media Holdings, a subsidiary of local cable provider GCI; contemporary announcements put the three stations — KXLJ in Juneau, KTNL in Sitka and KUBD in Ketchikan, together branded CBS Southeast Alaska — at the center of Denali's plan to build a statewide news and entertainment platform. The sale was completed on July 28, 2014. It made the trio sister stations to NBC affiliate KATH-LD in Juneau and its satellite KSCT-LP in Sitka, as well as to fellow CBS affiliate KTVA in Anchorage. For KUBD, ownership by the GCI subsidiary meant ownership by Alaska's largest telecommunications company — the same corporation whose cable system carried the station in Ketchikan, and whose rivalry with the municipal KPU system had framed the FCC debate over the sale.

The Gray transaction of 2020

Denali's broadcasting chapter closed in 2020. That year it was announced that Gray Television would purchase KUBD along with four other stations from Denali Media Holdings. The wider transaction reshaped Alaska television: Gray acquired most of the non-license assets of Anchorage CBS affiliate KTVA from Denali in a deal that closed on July 31, 2020, and began broadcasting KTVA's former schedule on its own Anchorage station KYES-TV — later KAUU — while also owning Anchorage NBC affiliate KTUU-TV. The FCC later concluded that this pairing of two top-four stations in Anchorage violated its local ownership rule and proposed, then imposed, proceedings that produced a forfeiture of $518,283 against Gray, calculated over 215 days. For KUBD itself the consequence was simpler and more durable: the station passed into the Gray group, and its CBS service became part of the Anchorage-centered system Gray was assembling, in which CBS programming originates with KAUU and is distributed across the state through low-power stations and full-power satellites such as KUBD.

Satellite of KYEX-LD and today's channel lineup

In its current configuration, KUBD is a full-time satellite of KYEX-LD, the Juneau-licensed low-power station that relays KAUU's CBS and MyNetworkTV services in the capital. The arrangement inverts the usual hierarchy — a full-power station taking its programming from a low-power one — but reflects how Southeast Alaska television is now organized: the programming originates in Anchorage, is staged through Juneau, and reaches Ketchikan on KUBD's channel 13 transmitter. KUBD presents on virtual channels 2 and 5 rather than its historic channel 4 (its virtual channel from 2009 to 2020). Its multiplex is shared between the region's two network services: channel 2.1 carries NBC in 1080i high definition; channel 5.1 carries CBS from KAUU in high definition under the KYES-HD label; and channel 5.4 carries MyNetworkTV. The station continues to brand its CBS service as CBS Southeast, and its listed website is that of Alaska's News Source, the Gray stations' shared Alaska news brand — the same newsroom identity carried by its sister stations KATH-LD and KSCT-LP.

Technical information

KUBD broadcasts on digital VHF channel 13 — the channel it first lit in early 2006 and on which it remained when the digital switchover took place in 2009, ending its analog service on channel 4. FCC records list the station under facility ID 60520, with an effective radiated power of just 0.18 kilowatts and a height above average terrain of negative 71 meters, figures that describe a downtown transmitter in a community hemmed in by mountains and water. In almost any other American market those numbers would describe a station that barely exists; in Ketchikan, where the FCC record shows over-the-air reception is virtually nonexistent and cable penetration exceeds 90 percent, KUBD's real distribution is its channel 4 position on GCI and on the city-owned KPU CommVision. The transmitter's job is to hold the license and the network exclusivity; the cable systems do the delivering.

KUBD's role in Southeast Alaska

KUBD matters out of proportion to its size because of where it sits. Ketchikan is the first city of Alaska — the southernmost significant community in the state, the first port of call for ferries and cruise ships entering the Inside Passage, and a place where the institutions of the continental United States arrive through exactly the kind of slender connections KUBD represents. Since 2000 the station has been that community's CBS affiliate: first under a small Colorado-based group that assembled Southeast Alaska's CBS trio, then under the broadcasting arm of the state's telecom champion, and since 2020 inside Gray Media's statewide system, as a satellite of a Juneau low-power station fed from Anchorage. Its call letters have been stable since 1998, its CBS affiliation since 2000 and its cable channel since its analog days. In a region where television ownership has turned over repeatedly, KUBD's continuity of service — CBS, on channel 4 on cable, in Ketchikan — is the essential fact of the station.