What would become the Salt Lake City market had an ignominious history with independent television before KSTU. Two attempts to operate independent stations on the VHF band in the late 1950s and early 1960s both fell through. KLOR-TV signed on in 1958 from
Provo. However, poor transmitter site selection hindered reception for many viewers in the
Wasatch Front whose antennas were aimed at the Oquirrh Mountains. It signed off in 1960, having been placed in bankruptcy, and the license was sold to
Brigham Young University for reactivation as
KBYU-TV. At the other end of the Wasatch Front, in
Ogden, KVOG-TV began on channel 9 in 1960 but was sold to the Ogden city school board in 1962 and converted to educational use as
KOET, which ceased broadcasting in 1973. During KOET's life, the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) blocked an attempt by the school board to sell the station back to a buyer to be reverted to commercial use because of the effects such a reclassification would have on the development of UHF, then an agency priority, and on educational broadcasting in northern Utah.
The channel 20 years Channel 20 was allocated to Salt Lake City in 1952, but there was no interest in the channel until a 1967 application was made by the Great Desert Broadcasting Company, which was never granted. In September 1977,
Springfield, Massachusetts–based
Springfield Television, whose other holdings were
NBC-affiliated flagship
WWLP in Springfield and
ABC affiliate
WKEF in
Dayton, Ohio, applied to the FCC for channel 20. There had been a previous full-service UHF educational station in the state:
KWCS-TV (channel 18) in Ogden, owned by the Weber County school system. The Springfield Television application came at a time when the Salt Lake market appeared "ripe" for a fourth station. By this time, two other events were occurring: another attempt was being made to restore channel 9 at Ogden to commercial status, and the FCC was also considering adding channel 13 to Salt Lake City. In March 1978, the FCC granted a construction permit to Springfield Television, which had previously announced that channel 20 would be Utah's only independent station and only commercial UHF outlet. Office space in the Salt Lake International Center, west of the airport, was constructed, KSTU began broadcasting on October 24, 1978, with a programming lineup typical of independent stations and broadcasting from a transmitter site leased from
KSL-TV in the Oquirrh Mountains. As the first UHF station in Utah in five years and the first-ever UHF outlet serving the full Salt Lake market, station promotions prior to the launch explained to viewers how to tune in: "Ever wonder what that other dial is for? It's for 'U'!" Almost immediately, Springfield Television also began building translators of its own in order to match the total coverage area of the existing local stations. The first KSTU-owned translator, on Levan Peak serving
Aurora, went into service in September 1979. Even though
Washington County rejected KSTU's initial proposal when the station did not offer funding to connect KSTU into the county translator network, new translators continued to come into service for several years in areas such as
Orangeville,
Cedar City, and
Vernal. Springfield Television reached an agreement to sell its entire group to Adams Communications in 1983 for $47.3 million. The Adams offer met the conditions for Springfield to sell: the stations were sold together, the current management was retained, and the price was agreeable. The deal was closed in 1984. On October 9, 1986, the station became a charter affiliate of the new Fox network. However, like most early Fox affiliates, the station was still mostly programmed as an independent due to Fox's limited output.
Channel 13 drops in When the FCC allocated television channels, the station spacing guidelines meant that inserting channel 13 in Salt Lake City was not possible. In 1968, the FCC denied a petition by Salt Lake radio station KLUB to add channel 13 to Salt Lake City so it could apply to build a companion TV station, which would have required changes in unused VHF assignments in
Richfield, Vernal, and
Rock Springs, Wyoming. That petition was opposed by Great Desert, which at the time was seeking channel 20; the Salt Lake VHF stations; and educational television interests in Utah, including KWCS-TV, who were concerned that a commercial station on channel 13 would affect the translators they used to rebroadcast their programming. The concept of VHF drop-ins—changes to station spacing that permitted the insertion of new VHF channel allocations in cities across the United States—continued to be of interest, particularly because, in other cities, there were not enough VHF television stations for all three major networks. In 1977, the FCC initially approved four drop-ins nationwide—including channel 13 for Salt Lake—having whittled down the number of proposed new channels in the preceding years. Its studies found that Salt Lake could support not one but two independent VHF outlets. Springfield Television, then still applying for a permit, asked for a chance to establish itself in the market before a VHF station was dropped in; the group contended that a VHF station would not mean automatic failure for a new UHF. The FCC reaffirmed the decision on a 4–3 vote in 1980. The approval came even though KSTU and KSL-TV had expressed renewed concern over a high-power channel 13 in Salt Lake City causing problems for the translator system. While KSTU was busy building translators to extend channel 20's reach, interested parties were busy filing applications for channel 13. In December 1980, the first application was received from Utah Television Associates, whose principals included Salt Lake businessman Richard S. McKnight. David and Deanna Williams, owners of a paging service and an AM station in
Bountiful, submitted a bid on March 10, 1981, under the name Intermountain Broadcasting. By May, when the commission set a deadline to receive other applications, the field had grown to eight with six further bidders: • American Television of Utah, a subsidiary of Salt Lake City–based
American Stores Company, which had also applied for the unused UHF channel 14; • West Valley City Television Associates Limited Partnership, led by Salt Lake advertising and real estate figures; • Mountain West Television Company, in which the largest shareholders were
KCPX radio news director Joseph C. Lee and Salt Lake City land developer Sidney Foulger; • Rocky Mountain Broadcasting, owned by real estate investor John Price; • Salt Lake City Family TV, consisting primarily of Pennsylvania and Tennessee interests; • and Salt Lake City Utah T.V., a company of
Malcolm Glazer, who owned network-affiliated stations in three smaller markets. This made Salt Lake City the first of the four drop-ins to attract more than one application. By 1984, however, there were multiple applications in all four cities, and Salt Lake was the last of the four to receive a designation for
comparative hearing among the applicants, on February 10, 1984. By that time, two of the eight applicants had dropped out. American Television had already won the channel 14 construction permit (which eventually materialized as
KXIV in 1989), and Rocky Mountain Broadcasting was no longer in contention by the time the hearing designation order was issued. FCC
administrative law judge Edward Kuhlmann issued an initial decision in May 1985 that looked toward granting Salt Lake City Family TV the permit because of its superior proposal for the integration of ownership and management. With Glazer's application having been abandoned, the four other contestants objected to the commission, whose review board scheduled oral argument in the case. Mountain West Television retained the advice of Wiley Rein, a Washington, D.C., law firm.
KSTU moves to channel 13; sale to Fox Wiley Rein attracted two other clients which had interest in channel 13. One was Northstar Communications, a Washington company financially backed by insurer
Allstate. The Mountain West principals, with Northstar, formed MWT Limited Partnership; Northstar insisted that Mountain West buy out the other applicants, leading to it obtaining the channel 13 permit. MWT then signed an agreement to purchase all of KSTU's non-license assets from Adams for $30 million in June 1987. Under the terms of the deal, MWT would operate channel 20 until the channel 13 facility was ready to be activated, after which it would surrender the channel 20 license. The Mountain West partners later said that Northstar had refused to provide the financing to outfit a new station, essentially forcing the company to buy KSTU for relocation. It was later reported that Adams was a client of Wiley Rein. To pay for the transaction, Mountain West borrowed $22.5 million; the deal included $10 million in a
non-compete agreement with Adams. On November 2, 1987, with the new transmitter facility complete, KSTU's intellectual property (call letters, Fox affiliation, syndicated programming and staff) moved from channel 20 to channel 13. It also moved to channel 13 on local cable systems. Due to the manner in which the changeover was structured legally, the FCC reckons KSTU's current facility on channel 13 as a new license dating from 1987; it was issued a construction permit under the call letters KTMW on July 17 and changed its call letters to KSTU on November 9. The obligations incurred by the Mountain West partners were financially debilitating. In August 1989, Mountain West and Farragut Communications—part of the Northstar group—put KSTU on the market. While multiple bidders, including
Meredith Broadcasting and a group led by then-Fox executive
Jamie Kellner, inspected the station, the Fox network itself purchased KSTU. Fox had just sold
WFXT in Boston, meaning it had the ability to buy another station. The $41 million deal resulted in the first network-owned TV station in Utah. The sale's outcome led to long-running litigation. Mountain West's partners said that Northstar capitalized on their weakened position to squeeze them out of profits on the sale to Fox. In 1990, they sued Wiley Rein for $20 million, which they calculated as the financial value if Northstar had financed their venture as a competing independent station. The case became one of the longest civil trials in Utah history; while a trial court initially dismissed the case, the
Utah Court of Appeals ordered a trial be held in 1996. After a three-month trial in which 1,000 exhibits were presented and the case record filled 31 volumes, a jury awarded the partners a net total of $18 million in December 1998, but the
Utah Supreme Court discarded the monetary award in 2001 and ordered another trial be held, finding that the trial judge had improperly instructed jurors. Under MWT, KSTU replaced KSL-TV as the exclusive broadcast television home of
Utah Jazz basketball in 1988, having carried some Jazz games over the preceding four seasons. However, KSTU indicated that it would not renew the deal after 1993, due to Fox initiating programming seven nights a week. This resulted in KXIV being purchased by Jazz owner
Larry H. Miller and becoming
KJZZ-TV. Under Fox, KSTU began airing local news programming in December 1991, progressively expanding its offerings through the next 15 years. At one time in the early 1990s,
Elisabeth Murdoch,
Rupert Murdoch's daughter, served as programming manager. In 2000, when Fox Television Stations acquired the
Chris-Craft Industries station group, it traded away ABC affiliate
KTVX to keep KSTU.
Local TV and Tribune ownership On June 13, 2007, Fox announced the sale of KSTU and seven other owned-and-operated stations to
Local TV LLC, a subsidiary of
Oak Hill Capital Partners. The sale was finalized on July 14, 2008. Under Local TV LLC, KSTU bought the adjacent building to double its studio footprint to , part of a construction project that also outfitted the station for high-definition news production. On July 1, 2013, the
Tribune Company acquired Local TV for $2.75 billion; the sale was completed on December 27. That year, KSTU ranked third in revenue among the four major Salt Lake TV stations, far behind KSL and KUTV but well ahead of KTVX.
Sinclair and Fox purchase attempt; sale to Scripps Sinclair Broadcast Group entered into an agreement to acquire Tribune Media on May 8, 2017, for $3.9 billion plus the assumption of $2.7 billion in Tribune-held debt. As Sinclair already owned KUTV,
KJZZ-TV, and
KMYU in the market, the company offered to sell KSTU back to Fox Television Stations as part of a $910 million deal;
Howard Stirk Holdings concurrently agreed to purchase KMYU. The merger was terminated on August 9, 2018, by Tribune Media, nullifying both transactions; this followed a public rejection of the deal by FCC chairman
Ajit Pai and vote by the commission to designate it for hearing by an administrative law judge, which was seen as a death knell for the proposed transaction. Following the collapse of the Sinclair merger,
Nexstar Media Group announced its intention to purchase Tribune Media on December 3, 2018, for $6.4 billion in cash and debt. Due to Nexstar owning KTVX and
KUCW, the
E. W. Scripps Company agreed to purchase KSTU as part of $1.32 billion in overall divestments by Nexstar in order to meet regulatory approval. The sale was completed on September 19, 2019. In the
2023–24 NHL season, during
Vegas Golden Knights conflicts on
KUPX-TV, select
Arizona Coyotes hockey games aired on KSTU's second digital subchannel, which usually carries
Antenna TV. ==News operation==