History
KBMY signed on for the first time on March 31, 1985, and KMCY signed on for the first time on June 19, 1985;[3][4] bringing the full ABC schedule to central and western North Dakota and eastern Montana for the first time ever. Before 1985, this area had been one of the last in the United States without full network service. ABC was limited to off-hours clearances on KX Television (KXMC/KXMD/KXMB/KXMA) and Meyer Television (KFYR/KQCD/KMOT/KUMV). From the 1970s onward, some cable subscribers in western North Dakota received the full ABC schedule from KULR-TV (now NBC) from Billings, KFBB-TV from Great Falls, KOTA-TV from Rapid City or KUSA in Denver. The eastern half of the market was served by Fargo's KTHI-TV (now KVLY-TV) until it swapped affiliations with WDAY/WDAZ in 1983. From 1983 onward, cable systems in Bismarck piped in WDAY-TV, while cable systems in Minot piped in WDAZ.
On paper, western North Dakota had been large enough to support three full network affiliates since at least the late 1960s. However, this region is one of the largest geographic markets in the nation, spilling across large slices of North Dakota, Montana, and South Dakota. It is so vast that KX Television and Meyer Television both needed four full-power stations to adequately cover it. On paper, the FCC collapsed central and western North Dakota into one giant market in 1957. However, due to Dickinson being on Mountain Time, the market was not fully realized until 1980, when Meyer upgraded its low-powered translator in Dickinson to full-powered KQCD, prompting Dickinson's original station, KDIX-TV (now KXMA) to become a separately-owned satellite of KX Television. Additionally, the only available commercial allocations were on the UHF band; UHF stations have never covered large areas very well. By the early 1980s, cable television—a must for acceptable television in much of this vast market—had gained enough penetration for a network affiliate on the UHF band to be viable.
In the early 2000s, KBMY signed on two low-powered translators to serve the smaller cities in the market, K44HR in Williston and K42FY in Dickinson. Prior to K44HR's inception, cable systems in Williston, Dickinson and the western half of the market piped in Denver's ABC affiliate—KUSA prior to 1995 and KMGH-TV after 1995. The Dickinson station directly repeated KBMY, while the Williston station repeated KMCY.
From the 1990s until 2007, KBMY and KMCY were known collectively as "ABC West". That year, the stations changed their monikers in favor of the station identities for their area. From 2002 until 2008, KBMY/KMCY was operated by Prime Cities Broadcasting, owner of western North Dakota's Fox affiliate, KNDX/KXND, in a local marketing agreement. The LMA allowed KBMY/KMCY to share the facilities, staff, and some equipment of KNDX/KXND.
The LMA with KNDX/KXND ended in 2008, with Forum opting to partner with Reiten Television in KBMY/KMCY's local operations via a joint sales agreement. While some local advertising staffers were based at KXMB-TV in Bismarck and KXMC-TV in Minot, most operations have been consolidated at WDAY-TV's studios in Fargo.
Under this arrangement, KBMY and KMCY's programming was transported from WDAY-TV's studios to Bismarck via leased microwave relay bandwidth furnished by Prairie Public Broadcasting's statewide digital terrestrial microwave network (the only permanent full-time video link from Fargo to Bismarck for television broadcasting). The signal was then sent to KXMB from Prairie Public via fiber-optic line, where it then is exported via a studio to transmitter link (STL) from KXMB's studios to KBMY and KMCY's transmitters.
As part of the JSA with Reiten, KBMY/KMCY were picked up on the digital subchannels of KX Television satellites KXMA-TV in Dickinson and KXMD-TV in Williston starting in May 2009, and the translators serving Dickinson and Williston were shut down. The JSA was terminated following the acquisition of the KX stations by Nexstar Broadcasting Group on February 2, 2016. At the same time, the ABC subchannels of KXMA and KXMD were replaced with The CW Plus.[5][6][7] Due to the high penetration of cable and satellite in this market, however, few viewers in the western part of the market lost access to ABC programming.
