Here's the very end of KOVR-13's analog broadcast on June 12th 2009- newscasters doing meaningless chit-chatting while someone cuts to a shot at the transmitter site. Then we have the last ever commercial break, final commercial being for Gottshalks going-out-of-business sale. The station goes off the air with live video of the transmitter's meters going down, audio signal goes out before the video does. Newscaster Sam Shane mistakenly tells us that the transmitter is in Walnut Creek- it's actually in Walnut GROVE, about 100 miles difference. KOVR started in 1955 (I think) as an ABC affiliate, and was the first station in the area to start broadcasting in stereo in 1985. (The neighboring San Francisco market wasn't nearly as fast; it took ABC-owned KGO channel 7 until *1987* to get stereo!) In 1995 they lost their ABC affiliation to KXTV channel 10, which was a CBS affiliate but wanted to switch to ABC since they had better ratings at the time, so KOVR got stuck with CBS. Then in 1998, network TV slit its own throat when CBS started keeping their logo onscreen during all their shows, and ABC followed soon afterwards- this resulted in KOVR spending more time broadcasting the CBS logo than KXTV ever did, and likewise for KXTV with ABC's logo. I pretty much stopped watching TV after that; I think KOVR's HD digital station went on the air around 1998, but with the CBS logo on the screen I wasn't interested in seeing that in higher resolution. CBS ended up buying KOVR and ...
Keywords: KOVR, analog TV, analog shutdown, sign-off, Walnut Grove, 6/12/09, Black Oak Casino, Raging Waters, Cal Expo, Verizon Wireless, Empiretoday.com, Empire Carpets, Sam Shane
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