Early history The station was established by Dr. John C. Schwarzwalder, a professor in the Radio-Television Department at the
University of Houston (UH), and Dr. John W. Meaney, an English professor at UH, and was first signed on the air on May 25, 1953, as the first station to broadcast under an educational non-profit license in the United States, and one of the earliest member stations of
National Educational Television, which was succeeded by PBS. KUHT, co-located with FM station
KUHF, originally operated from the
Ezekiel W. Cullen Building on the UH campus. Its dedication ceremonies were broadcast on June 8 of that year. The station's initial cost was an investment of $350,000, and had an annual operating budget of about $110,000. Originally licensed to both UH and the Houston Independent School District, UH became its sole licensee in 1959. The station also offered the university's first
televised college credit classes. Running 13 to 15 hours weekly, these telecasts accounted for 38 percent of the program schedule. Most courses aired at night so that students who worked during the day could watch them. By the mid-1960s, with about one-third of the station's programming devoted to educational programming, more than 100,000 semester hours had been taught on KUHT. In 1964, KUHT and KUHF moved into new studio facilities in the defunct Texas Television Center located on Cullen Boulevard, which were previously occupied by
DuMont Television Network affiliate
KNUZ-TV. When KNUZ-TV went dark,
ABC affiliate (now
owned-and-operated station)
KTRK-TV (channel 13) used the facility from KTRK's inception in 1954, until it moved to its current studios on Bissonnet Street in 1961. This studio would host both stations for the next 35 years, until the move across campus to the current Melcher Center for Public Broadcasting in 2000. KUHT purchased a new transmitter that not only enabled the station to broadcast beyond
Harris County into its surrounding areas, but also to begin broadcasting in
color. Five years later, in 1969, the Association for Community Television was formed to fund KUHT.
PBS era In 1970, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), the successor network to National Educational Television, began service, combining televised educational lectures with popular programs such as
Sesame Street,
NOVA and
Masterpiece Theatre that remain PBS staples to this day. The station is also noted in Houston for many technical firsts at the local level. In 1981, KUHT became Houston's first television station to provide
closed captioning, and 10 years later, in 1991, it became the first station in Houston to offer
Descriptive Video Service audio, and other services for the visually impaired as well as bilingual viewers via a
secondary audio program feed. In 1982, with assistance from KTRK and then-
independent station KRIV (channel 26, now a
Fox owned-and-operated station), KUHT began operating a new transmitter located near Missouri City – making it one of several television and radio stations that now broadcast from that location. KUHT was known on-air as "Houston Public Television" for many years before adopting the "HoustonPBS" moniker in the early 21st century. From 1993 into the early 2000s, KUHT's logo also did not include the number 8, but used a logo similar to the ones used by
Detroit's
WTVS and
Seattle's
KCTS-TV. These stations are members of Lark International, a public television production company, which owns the sunburst-on-square logo; however, they are not related to each other. KUHT's logo during this era was based on the sunburst portion of that logo. On August 21, 2000, KUHT moved to its current studios in the LeRoy and Lucile Melcher Center for Public Broadcasting on the UH campus, where KUHT shares broadcast facilities with public radio station
KUHF—both owned by and licensed to the UH System—where the complex is located. The previous facility is now in use by the university's Texas Learning and Computation Center. On March 3, 2014, KUHT, along with KUHF and 91.7 KUHA (owned by the university at the time, now
Hope Media Group-owned
KHVU), were all rebranded into Houston Public Media. The station dropped the "HoustonPBS" name to assume the new name. In late-August 2017,
Tegna-owned
CBS affiliate
KHOU (channel 11) temporarily moved its news and broadcasting operations to Melcher Center. KHOU's
Neartown facility had suffered catastrophic
flooding during
Hurricane Harvey. On November 16, 2017, KHOU announced it would not return to its former studios; the building would be subsequently demolished in May 2018. The station remained at the Melcher Center until their new facility at 5718
Westheimer Road near
Uptown Houston was completed in February 2019. ==Film library==