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| City | Cape Girardeau, Missouri |
|---|---|
| Channels | |
| Branding | Fox 23 |
| Programming | |
| Affiliations |
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| Ownership | |
| Owner |
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| WDKA | |
| History | |
| Founded | June 1, 1982 (42 years ago) (1982-06-01) |
First air date | September 10, 1983 (41 years ago) (1983-09-10) |
Former channel number(s) |
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Call sign meaning | Station's coverage area of Kentucky, the(Missouri) Bootheel, andSouthern Illinois |
| Technical information[2] | |
Licensing authority | FCC |
| Facility ID | 19593 |
| ERP | 1,000 kW |
| HAAT | 543 m (1,781 ft) |
| Transmitter coordinates | 37°24′23″N89°33′44″W / 37.40639°N 89.56222°W /37.40639; -89.56222 |
| Links | |
Public license information | |
| Website | kbsi23 |
KBSI (channel 23) is atelevision station licensed toCape Girardeau, Missouri, United States, serving as theFox affiliate for Southeastern Missouri, thePurchase area ofWestern Kentucky,Southern Illinois, andNorthwest Tennessee. It is owned by the Community News Media subsidiary ofStandard Media alongsidePaducah, Kentucky–licensedMyNetworkTV affiliateWDKA (channel 49). The two stations share studios on Enterprise Street in Cape Girardeau; KBSI's transmitter is located inunincorporatedCape Girardeau County north of the city.
The station signed on the air on September 10, 1983, as anindependent station and aired ananalog signal on UHF channel 23.[3] The station was originally owned by Cape Girardeau Family Television, Ltd., in turn 51 percent owned by Media Central ofChattanooga, Tennessee. It was not the first independent to operate in the market—two stations broadcast in southern Illinois, and a prior attempt had been made at an independent in Paducah[4]—but it was the first to cover all of it, which was the reason Media Central had been attracted to the area.[5]
Media Central filed for bankruptcy in 1987 to fend off a hostile takeover attempt.[6] That same year, despite having passed on the opportunity a year prior,[7] KBSI joined Fox on September 7, in part because of the Media Central bankruptcy.[8][9] Media Central continued to own the station until a bankruptcy judge approved its acquisition by Engles Communications, owned by David Engles, a former Warner Bros. and NBC radio executive.[10] Under Engles, KBSI picked up the first season ofNYPD Blue when ABC affiliateWSIL-TV refused to air the show.[11]
Engles then sold the station to Max Television (laterMax Media Properties) in 1995.[12] In 1998,Sinclair Broadcast Group acquired most of the Max Media Properties stations, including KBSI; it owned KBSI and later WDKA in Paducah until both were sold to Community News Media for $28 million in a transaction that closed in 2021.[13]
From 2006 to September 30, 2010,NBC affiliateWPSD-TV (owned by thePaxton Media Group) produced a nightly prime time newscast for KBSI through a news share agreement.[14] When the WPSD newscast started, KBSI competed with another nightly half-hour newscast at 9 p.m. on the area'slow-poweredCW affiliatesWQTV-LP/WQWQ-LP. That newscast, produced byCBS affiliateKFVS-TV, focused on news from southeastern Missouri and was eventually canceled on July 29, 2007.[15]
On October 1, 2010, KBSI entered into a new agreement with KFVS to produce the newscast, which expanded to an hour in length. This agreement ended in March 2022 with KFVS moving the newscast to KFVS-DT2. On March 28, 2022, KBSI debuted its own newscast, produced out ofLincoln, Nebraska, at sister stationKLKN. The news and weather anchors are based in Lincoln while the reporters work out of the KBSI studios in Cape Girardeau.
The station's signal ismultiplexed:
| Channel | Res. | Aspect | Short name | Programming |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23.1 | 720p | 16:9 | KBSI-DT | Fox |
| 23.2 | 480i | WDKA-DT | MyNetworkTV inSD (WDKA) | |
| 23.3 | 480i | COMET | Comet | |
| 23.4 | DEFY | Ion Plus | ||
| 23.5 | BOUNCE | Bounce TV | ||
| 23.6 | SC NEWS | [Blank] |
KBSI shut down its analog signal, overUHF channel 23, on February 17, 2009, the original target date on which full-power television stations in the United States were totransition from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate (which was later pushed back to June 12, 2009). The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 22,[17] usingvirtual channel 23.