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KEMO-TV (channel 50) is a television station licensed to Fremont, California, United States, serving the San Francisco Bay Area with programming from Fubo Sports Network. HC2 Subchannels (March 7, 2025) The station is owned by Innovate Corp. KEMO-TV's transmitter is located at San Francisco's Sutro Tower, and is shared with KMTP-TV, KCNS, and KTNC-TV.
This much anticipated effort to establish a local North Bay TV station in Santa Rosa, led by Atkinson and partner Kit Spier (formerly an executive at KNBC in Los Angeles), was under-financed and lasted only a year. The station was off the air more than it was on, and after the novelty of a new TV station wore off, viewers had little confidence and the station went dark.
Nothing more happened until 1981, when Wishard Brown, who had owned the Marin Independent Journal newspaper and San Rafael radio station KVVZ, revived Channel 50 with an eye to making it a local news authority.
The second incarnation of KFTY went live in a former furniture store on Mendocino Avenue on May 15, 1981, with broadcaster Jim Johnson (now an independent insurance and investment broker in Santa Rosa) as general manager.
A news department was formed with Bob Sherwood, formerly of KGO-TV (channel 7), as the station's first news director, and Rod Sherry, then a veteran KPIX anchor, as the weekend anchor and later news producer. Some of the news reporters included Deb Sherwood, Fred Wayne, Karen Clinton, Karen Provenza, Ed Beebout, and Diane Kaufman.
Through the 1980s, the local news operation expanded and became a training ground for more future big-market broadcasters such as Bill Martin, the veteran KTVU (channel 2) meteorologist, Manuel Gallegos, who went to CBS, Fred Wayne, who went to KCBS in San Francisco, and sportscaster Dale Julian, who later went to the then San Jose Mercury News.
News 50 adopted the slogan, "We do it twice, every night," upon expanding its weeknight news reports to 7:30 and 10:30 p.m. The "North Bay News" was a very popular look at regional stories that the TV stations in the central San Francisco Bay Area rarely covered; KFTY also shared video tape of local news stories with other TV stations.
The third incarnation of KFTY took hold in the mid-1990s, when KFTY was sold to the Ackerley Group in 1996 and then to the television arm of Clear Channel Communications (now iHeartMedia) in 2002; that company, after being bought out by private equity firms, announced the sale of KFTY and its other television stations on November 16, 2006. On January 26, 2007, weeks after Clear Channel announced plans to sell its stations, station manager John Burgess was ordered to shut down the news department, much to the disappointment of viewers in Sonoma, Marin, Napa, and Mendocino counties. Some of the reporters went to other TV stations, some retired, and some moved into other careers. Anchor Ed Beebout is now a communications professor at Sonoma State University, and reporter Curtiss Kim is now a news anchor at KSRO (1350 AM) in Santa Rosa.
On April 20, 2007, Clear Channel entered into an agreement to sell its entire television station group to Providence Equity Partners' Newport Television. Providence initially announced that it would not keep KFTY or sister station KVOS-TV in Bellingham, Washington; instead, those stations were to be turned over to LK Station Group.
Because LK could not obtain financing for the purchase, KFTY was instead sold to High Plains Broadcasting (Providence could not keep KFTY because it held a 19 percent ownership stake in Univision Communications, which already owns two stations in the Bay Area market, KDTV-DT channel 14 and KFSF-DT channel 66). Newport Television began managing KFTY through a joint sales agreement (JSA), though High Plains controlled KFTY's programming.
On April 25, 2011, KFTY affiliated with the classic television network MeTV as part of an affiliation agreement between the network and Newport. Branded as "MeTV Bay Area", KFTY aired MeTV programming from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. on weekdays. In addition to MeTV programming, KFTY also carried syndicated and locally produced programming, including the weekday morning talk show Armstrong & Getty (a radio simulcast from KNEW, which aired from 6 to 10 a.m.), news and weather segments known as "Headlines and Weather on the Hour" that aired throughout the day (in addition to news segments anchored by Elisha Rivers that ran every half-hour during Armstrong & Getty), the Sunday evening discussion program YSN365 Sports Show hosted by Dave Cox, the community affairs program Your Turn, and the "pay-to-play" program TV 50 Marketplace, initially hosted by Nazy Javid and then by Angela Young.
The fourth incarnation of KFTY started on July 28, 2011, when High Plains Broadcasting announced plans to sell KFTY to Una Vez Más Holdings, LLC, with plans to affiliate KFTY with Azteca; Una Vez Mas Buys KFTY San Francisco, TVNewsCheck, July 28, 2011. The new owners changed the station's callsign to KEMO-TV, which was previously used as the callsign of KOFY-TV (channel 20) prior to 1986.
On September 29, 2011, KFTY switched its affiliation to Azteca, becoming one of two affiliates of the Spanish-language network in the Bay Area – alongside KOFY, which carried Azteca on its 20.4 subchannel; KOFY dropped Azteca programming shortly afterward. The MeTV affiliation moved to KOFY digital subchannel 20.2 on October 17, 2011. TV News Check: "Me-TV signs with KOFY San Francisco", October 17, 2011.
In 2014, Una Vez Mas' TV assets (including KEMO-TV) were then sold to Northstar Media, LLC. In turn, HC2 Holdings acquired Northstar Media in addition to Azteca América on November 29, 2017, making KEMO an Azteca owned-and-operated station. Azteca America Acquired by HC2 Holdings Unit - Broadcasting & Cable (accessed March 19, 2018)
On March 29, 2021, KEMO flipped its main .1 channel to Estrella TV and moved Azteca programming to its .2 subchannel where it remained until the network's demise. Estrella Media Launches Television Station in San Francisco Bay Area (March 29, 2021) On April 1, 2024, KEMO dropped Estrella and switched its main channel to ShopHQ. Digital TV Market Listing for KEMO Estrella moved to a series of low-power stations on virtual channel 30.1, led by San Francisco-based KMMC-LD. On February 1, 2025, KEMO dropped ShopHQ and switched its main channel to Fubo Sports Network as a result of a partnership between Fubo and Innovate Corp. subsidiary HC2 Broadcasting.
KEMO-TV aired national newscasts produced by Estrella TV while it was an affiliate. It does not currently air any news programming.
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Wayback Machine: the original date of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television, List of Full-Power Stations which was later moved to June 12. The station's digital signal moved from its pre-transition UHF channel 54, which was among the high band UHF channels (52-69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition, to UHF channel 32, using virtual channel 50.
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