KNBC-TV

KNBC (channel 4) is a television station in Los Angeles, California, United States, serving as the West Coast flagship of the NBC network. It is owned and operated by the network's NBC Owned Television Stations division alongside Corona-licensed Telemundo outlet KVEA (channel 52). Both stations share studios at the Brokaw News Center in the northwest corner of the Universal Studios Hollywood lot off of Lankershim Boulevard in Universal City, while KNBC's transmitter is located on Mount Wilson. History Channel 4 first went on the air as KNBH (standing for "NBC Hollywood") on January 16, 1949. It was the second-to-last VHF station in Los Angeles to debut, and the last of NBC's five original owned-and-operated stations to sign on. Unlike the other four, KNBH was the only NBC-owned television station that did not benefit from having a sister radio station. Though the NBC Radio Network had long been affiliated with KFI in Los Angeles, that relationship did not extend into television when KFI-TV (channel 9, now KCAL-TV) signed on in August 1948. When KNBH signed on, it marked the debut of NBC programs on the West Coast. Channel 4 originally broadcast from the NBC Radio City Studios on Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street in Hollywood. The station changed its callsign to KRCA (for NBC's then-parent company, the Radio Corporation of America) on October 18, 1954. The call letters were changed again on November 11, 1962, when NBC moved the KNBC identity from its San Francisco radio station (which became KNBR) and applied it to channel 4 in Los Angeles. That call letter change coincided with the station's physical relocation from NBC Radio City to the network's color broadcast studio facility in suburban Burbank. NBC Color City, as it was then known, had been in operation since March 1955, and was at least four to five times larger than Radio City, and could easily accommodate KNBC's locally produced studio programming. NBC Radio's West Coast operations eventually followed channel 4 to Burbank not too long after.