As a semi-satellite of KXAN
On November 5, 1985, the Llano Broadcasting Co. (owned by Round Mountain–based judge A.W. Mousund and his wife, Mary Mousund, who later renamed the licensee Horseshoe Bay Centex Broadcasting Co.) filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a license and construction permit to operate a commercial television station on UHF channel 14. On July 10, 1986, the Mousunds received approval to assign KLNO (in reference to its city of license, Llano) for use as the television station's call letters.[1][2]
Although KXAN-TV (then known as KTVV) increased its transmitting power in 1973, the station found it difficult to adequately compete against CBS affiliate KTBC-TV (channel 7, now a Fox owned-and-operated station), ABC affiliate KVUE (channel 24) and, later, [the original] KBVO-TV (channel 42, now CBS affiliate KEYE-TV) largely because of the difficulties that UHF television stations experienced with signal propagation in areas of rugged terrain. The station's analog signal on UHF channel 36 provided an inadequate over-the-air signal to the western part of the Hill Country and was marginal to basically unviewable in Llano, Fredericksburg, Blanco and surrounding areas, with some parts of the region only being able to receive a clear signal from channel 36 once cable television became established in the Austin market in the late 1970s.
To solve this coverage gap problem, in 1989, KXAN rolled out plans to launch a network of UHF repeater stations to serve areas that had fair to no reception of its main signal, which was to have included five low-power television stations serving Llano, Blanco, San Marcos and Burnet as well as a fill-in translator in Austin. On May 9, 1989, LIN Broadcasting—through an indirect subsidiary, Kingstip Communications Inc., which LIN acquired as part of its 1979 purchase of channel 36—filed an application to acquire the dormant KLNO license from Horseshoe Bay Centex Broadcasting Co. (which was unable to complete construction of the KLNO transmitter) for $100,000; LIN intended to launch KLNO as a semi-satellite of KXAN to reach viewers in the western Hill Country who could not adequately receive the channel 36 signal.[3][4][5] On December 6, 1990, the FCC granted LIN/Kingstip's application to acquire the construction permit for KLNO, conditioned upon the payment to Horseshoe Centex Broadcasting not exceeding $100,000.[6]
Channel 14 first signed on the air as a KXAN semi-satellite on September 6, 1991; it was the first (and only) full-power television station ever built and signed-on by the LIN TV Corporation (which operated at the time as the television broadcasting unit of original parent LIN Broadcasting). While the station was intended to improve KXAN's over-the-air reception in eleven Central Texas counties (especially in Llano, Burnet, Blanco, Gillespie, Mason, San Saba and Lampasas counties), some viewers in this part of the Hill Country initially complained that the KLNO signal created interference issues (including, among others, signal shadowing and double-imaging) with other Austin-area television stations. In an Austin American-Statesman report on these issues published three weeks after KLNO's sign-on, KXAN chief engineer Dave Daniel cited that signal amplifiers installed onto the home antennas of many Hill Country residents to enhance reception of other Austin-area stations had the side effect of strengthening the Channel 14 signal to levels that interfered with those stations; to remedy this problem, the KXAN engineering staff developed amplifier filters to be distributed to affected area residents.[7]
After only one month on the air, in order to match its parent station, LIN changed the Llano station's call letters to KXAM-TV on October 14, 1991. (For ratings purposes, Nielsen identified the two stations collectively as "KXAN+" in its local ratings tabulation diaries.)[8] The station simulcast KXAN-TV's programming for most of the broadcast day, with the exception of breakaways for local news inserts produced from a bureau facility in Llano (which was equipped with a microwave truck and a live microwave link to a relay tower in Round Mountain) that were placed into channel 36's newscasts. KLNO/KXAM's existence was primarily acknowledged only in KXAN's legal station identifications, with a variant of channel 36's logo being utilized for disambiguation purposes in channel 14's own station IDs and periodically during KXAN's newscasts until February 2007. Along with other improvements to the station's news operations, the expanded signal coverage provided by Channel 14 helped boost KXAN's profile in the market, helping it vie for first place with KVUE (as KTBC's own news viewership declined following that station's July 1995 switch to Fox) in the late 1990s.
On January 14, 2002, KBVO-CA converted into a Spanish language station, when it became a charter affiliate of TeleFutura (now UniMás); in January 2009, that station converted into a full-time simulcast of primary CW/secondary MyNetworkTV-affiliated sister station KNVA (channel 54), after Univision Communications acquired the local affiliation rights to TeleFutura and migrated its programming to Class-A low-power station KTFO-CA (channel 31), which the company had previously operated as a repeater of Univision owned-and-operated station KAKW-TV (channel 62).
As a separate entertainment-based station; MyNetworkTV affiliation
On August 3, 2009, Channel 14's call letters were changed to KBVO, named after the University of Texas at Austin's mascot, "Bevo". (Prior to being reassigned for use by Channel 14 repeater station KBVO-CA in 1995, the callsign had originally been used on UHF channel 42 from its December 1983 sign-on as an independent station until it became a CBS affiliate, accordingly adopting the KEYE-TV call letters, in July 1995.) Subsequently, on October 21, KBVO took over as the Austin-area affiliate of MyNetworkTV, assuming the programming rights from KNVA, which had carried it on a tape delayed basis since the network-turned-programming service launched in September 2006 (initially airing from 9 to 11 p.m. after CW prime time programming, before temporarily being shifted one hour later after KNVA debuted a KXAN-produced 9 p.m. newscast on September 21, 2009). Until fellow charter MyNetworkTV affiliate WKTC in Columbia, South Carolina, added a primary affiliation with The CW in August 2014, KNVA was one of two American television stations (not counting a handful of others that carry both networks on separate subchannels) that carried programming from both The CW and MyNetworkTV. (The other, KWKB in Iowa City, Iowa, continued to carry the full schedules of both netlets/programming services for another two years until it also chose to disaffiliate from MyNetworkTV and become an exclusive CW affiliate in 2016.)[9]
KBVO—which originally branded as "MyAustinTV" under the service's branding conventions, before identifying solely by its call letters in 2012—also adopted a separate program schedule (consisting mainly of first-run syndicated
