Kaiser Broadcasting

The Kaiser Broadcasting Corp. was an American broadcast media company that owned and operated television and radio stations in the United States from 1957 to 1977. History Creating a broadcast chain Kaiser's involvement in broadcasting began in 1957 when the Henry J. Kaiser Company Ltd., a multi-industrial conglomerate led by the eponymous industrialist, signed on KHVH and independent KHVH-TV (channel 13) in Honolulu, Hawaii, within two months of each other. Both stations were located in the Hawaiian Village Hotel, which Kaiser also owned and from which the call sign was derived. Kaiser purchased KULA-TV (channel 4) on May 8, 1958, changed its calls to KHVH-TV on July 16, 1958, and returned the original KHVH-TV license to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Kaiser also acquired San Francisco station KBAY-FM in 1960, renaming it KFOG-FM and implementing a beautiful music format. Later in the 1960s, Kaiser explored new opportunities to expand its broadcast holdings on the U.S. mainland: construction permits were secured for multiple ultra high frequency (UHF) stations, all in large markets, and KHVH-TV was sold off to help fund this expansion. The first two of these stations signed on during 1965: WKBD-TV in Detroit went on the air in January, followed nine months later by WKBS-TV in Burlington, New Jersey, a suburb of Philadelphia. WKBD-TV's debut was auspicious as the station's schedule consisted entirely of live sports play-by-play, a first in American broadcasting.