From CBS to Fox affiliation
In December 1993, Fox outbid CBS to obtain the broadcast rights to football games from the National Football Conference of the NFL.[12][13] In 1994, New World Communications signed a long-term affiliation deal with Fox, which was establishing itself as a major network and was looking for more VHF stations. In the case of Austin, the original KBVO-TV (channel 42) was among the top 10 rated Fox affiliates in the U.S. at the time, yet Fox considered KTBC a far more desirable affiliate prospect due to its VHF dial position.
In late 1994, most New World-owned stations (except for two) dropped their longtime "Big Three" affiliations and switched to Fox.[14][15] On January 19, 1995, New World took over operations of the Argyle stations through time brokerage agreements. Nearly three months later, New World completed its merger with Argyle.
The last CBS network program to air on KTBC was a repeat of Walker, Texas Ranger at 9 p.m. Central Time on July 1, 1995, the day that channel 7 ended its 43-year affiliation with the network and became a Fox affiliate; the CBS affiliation went to former Fox affiliate KBVO-TV, which changed its call letters to KEYE-TV. KEYE was the only logical choice as the market's replacement CBS affiliate, as both KXAN and KVUE had long-term affiliation contracts with NBC and ABC respectively at the time. As the new Fox affiliate, channel 7 was able to continue as Austin's unofficial "home" of the Dallas Cowboys, because of Fox's rights to the NFC. KTBC had carried most Cowboys games since the team's inception in 1960 by virtue of CBS winning television rights to the NFL in 1956. For many years, it also carried Cowboys preseason games, though those telecasts moved to KEYE in 2006.
In its early years as a Fox station, KTBC filled its daytime lineup with talk shows and the nighttime schedule with off-network sitcoms. Although Channel 7 acquired the rights to most of Fox's programming, KTBC and K13VC initially split the local broadcast rights to the network's children's programming block, Fox Kids, as KTBC station management declined to carry the block's weekday lineup, a move which had become standard practice for the other New World stations that had joined Fox since September 1994. KTBC only took the Saturday morning Fox Kids lineup, and simulcast it in conjunction with K13VC until September 1997, when the former ceded its partial rights to Fox Kids exclusively to Channel 13 and replaced it with real estate, paid and E/I-compliant programs. (K13VC continued to air the weekday children's block until Fox discontinued it, confining Fox Kids programming, to Saturdays on December 31, 2001; it began carrying Fox Kids successor, the FoxBox, on September 14, 2002, and continued to air that block until the station ceased operations in 2003. Neither the block, renamed to 4KidsTV in 2005 nor its successor, Weekend Marketplace, have been carried in the Austin market since.)
The station came under the ownership of Fox when New World merged with Fox Television Stations in 1996;[16] this made KTBC the first owned-and-operated network station in the Austin market. With the exclusion of semi-satellite outlets, KTBC has always been the smallest O&O under Fox's portfolio, as the fast-growing Austin region did not become a Top 50 market until the late 2000s. In the spring of 1997, a rumor that KTBC and Phoenix's KSAZ-TV would be traded to the Belo Corporation in exchange for Seattle's KIRO-TV circulated,[17] but this deal never came to fruition. Belo would acquire rival KVUE and Phoenix's KTVK two years later.
