According to filings with the Federal Communications Commission, the station assets of KTVA are being sold to Alaska Public Media for $200,000. Alaska Public Media is a PBS affiliate and owns KAKM.
In 2021, the CBS affiliation of KTVA was spun off to KYES, which is owned by Gray Television, which owns KTUU. The two stations are essentially combined.
But KTVA itself was not sold, and remained an orphan property of Denali Media Holdings, which is a subsidiary of GCI.
The news of the KTVA sale was first reported on Friday by Radio & Television Business Report, a website reporting on the business of broadcasting. The story is behind a paywall at this link.
Adam Jacobson, editor of RBR.com, said that Gray wanted a second station in Anchorage, but any purchase of KTVA as a CBS affiliate ran afoul of FCC rules that prohibit a station from owning two of the top-four stations in a market. Gray did a workaround by simply moving the CBS affiliation to a station few tuned into. See the FCC sanctions that resulted at this link. The fine levied was over $500,000.
That the PBS-affiliated organization will now have two stations in the same Nielsen Designated Market Area market will not likely raise the same concerns, but the FCC still must approve the sale, something it is expected to do within a few months, or at least before the next president has an opportunity to reappoint a new chairman for the FCC. It’s not clear what Alaska Public Media will do with its new acquisition.
Over the past few years, GCI was sold to Liberty Broadband in 2020. Liberty is now in the process of merging with Charter Communications.
GCI was Alaska’s first technology startup, beginning in 1979 out of an apartment in Anchorage by company founders Ron Duncan and Bob Walp, who launched it by rebranding phone cards and ultimately created create a long-distance phone service provider that gave Alaskans more affordable options to communicate across the country.
At that time GCI started, long-distance phone calls cost Alaskans $1 per minute. But after GCI pioneered DAMA satellite communication to deliver in-state long distance, and introduced competitive facilities-based local phone service, costs came down dramatically.
GCI employs about 2,000 Alaskans.
GCI kicked RCA Alascom’s, AT&T Alascom’s and Alaska Communications System’s a—s back in the old days, both through better and cheaper service and by calling them out on their illegal network activities and lousy customer service. GCI went downhill fairly quickly after that, and I’m sad to see it go. It isn’t really a merger but it is a buyout by Charter, who is a crappy cable TV company that will make GCI even worse than it currently is. I feel somewhat sorry for the folks who work there.
Just a little nostalgia – Augie Hiebert, a true pioneer, organized Northern Television in 1952 for the purpose of building the first TV station in Alaska. Mission accomplished as KTVA went on the air in December of 1953. Augie proudly hitched KTVA’s wagon to the Tiffany Network as CBS was then known. A highpoint in this decades-long relationship came in 1982 when famed CBS newsman Walter Cronkite and wife Betsy accepted Augie’s invitation to tour Alaska. Of course, broadcast television is not now what it once was. But, back in the day, it was kind of a big deal. For Augie Hiebert, it was a huge leap of faith to make such a large investment in cutting-edge technology in service to such a small market as Anchorage was at the time. But he was a visionary, not just in the power of television, but in the future of Alaska.