WKOW

WKOW (channel 27) is a television station in Madison, Wisconsin, United States, affiliated with ABC and owned by Allen Media Group. The station's studios are located on Tokay Boulevard on Madison's west side, and its transmitter is located on South Pleasant View Road in the city's Junction Ridge neighborhood.

WKOW serves as the master hub for Allen Media Group's five-station network of ABC affiliates throughout western and northern Wisconsin.

History

WKOW-TV (the suffix was dropped from the call sign in 2009) was launched on June 30, 1953, as Madison's first television station.[1] The station was originally aligned with CBS and owned by the Monona Broadcasting Company, led by a group of local area businessmen along with WKOW radio (AM 1070, now WTSO). The WKOW call sign was an acknowledgment to Wisconsin's dairy industry, and featured a smiling bovine (or cow) alongside the emphasized "K-O-W" of the call sign. WKOW-AM-TV shared studios on Tokay Boulevard on Madison's west side beginning in 1953.

WKOW-TV remained with CBS until 1956, when CBS moved to the new

Programming

Sports programming

WKOW serves as the originating station for broadcasts of Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association (WIAA) championship events. WKOW, its Allen Media-owned sister stations in Central and Western Wisconsin, and affiliates in the Milwaukee and Green Bay markets air WIAA boys' and girls' hockey and basketball state championships each March. (The hockey and boys' basketball tournaments are staged in Madison, the girls' basketball tournament in Green Bay.) WKOW is also an affiliate of the Green Bay Packers television network along with its AMG sisters, carrying the team's preseason games and in-season programming. By coincidence as part of AMG's investment in Diamond Sports Group, WKOW is now a half-sister operation of Bally Sports Wisconsin. In 2023, WKOW and its sisters and other affiliates began to also carry the WIAA football championships at Camp Randall Stadium, returning the games to the station for the first time since the mid 1990s.

Subchannel 27.2 has cleared any ABC programming that may be preempted on 27.1 for local sports and breaking news coverage (e.g. coverage of the WIAA state hockey and basketball tournaments carried each March on 27.1).

Until the 2023 (when the rights to Big Ten Conference sports departed ABC and ESPN), WKOW carried Wisconsin Badgers sports originated at the network level.

News operation

WKOW presently broadcasts 24 1/2 hours of local newscasts each week (with 4 1/2 hours each weekday and two hours each on Saturdays and Sundays).

WKOW debuted a news department on the first day of its broadcasting in summer 1953. Local news, weather, and sports were seen in the initial shows. From 1999 to 2011, the station produced, through a news share agreement, the market's first nightly prime time newscast on Sinclair-owned Fox affiliate WMSN-TV (Fox 47 News at 9); the newscast originated from a secondary studio at WKOW, and although it featured WKOW personnel in the broadcasts, WMSN maintained separate weeknight news and sports anchors, as well as using theme music and graphics packages that are found on other Sinclair stations and that are different from that on WKOW's newscasts. (WISC-TV subchannel TVW had aired a prime-time newscast from 2004 to 2011; a third station, WBUW, had its own 9 p.m. newscast from 2003 until 2005.) WISC-TV took over the production of the WMSN newscast at the beginning of 2012.

On October 26, 2010, WKOW became the third station in Madison to upgrade newscasts to high definition, following WISC-TV and WMTV. The WMSN broadcasts, however, were still in 4:3 standard definition, as the station did not have the necessary equipment to air local or syndicated HD programming.

callsign	WKOW
branding	WKOW 27 (call letters are pronounced individually); 27 News
digital	26 (UHF)
virtual	27
affiliations	27.1: ABC for others, see
owner	Allen Media Broadcasting
licensee	Madison TV License Company, LLC
location	Madison, Wisconsin
country	United States
airdate	June 30, 1953
callsign meaning	"cow" (for Wisconsin's dairy industry)
former callsigns	WKOW-TV (1953–2009)
former channel numbers	Analog: 27 (UHF, 1953–2009)
former affiliations	CBS (1953–1956)
erp	800 kW
haat	455 m
facility id	64545
coordinates	43.05583°N, -89.535°W
licensing authority	FCC
website	https://wkow.com/

History

Digital television

Programming

Sports programming

News operation

Technical information

Subchannels

Analog-to-digital conversion

External links

References