The Bahía de San Francisco Television Company, owned by principals of the Spanish International Network including Rene Anselmo and Danny Villanueva, applied on July 20, 1973, for a construction permit to build a new television station on San Francisco's channel 60.^[4] The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted the application on November 13, 1974. Channel 60 had originally been assigned for noncommercial use in San Francisco, and KQED held a permit for it, but when that station accepted a gift from Metromedia of the facility for channel 32,^[5] the noncommercial reservation was switched to channel 32, changing channel 60 to commercial.^[6]

From studios on Palou Avenue in San Francisco and the former transmitting facilities of KBHK-TV on San Bruno Mountain, channel 60 made its debut on August 10, 1975.^[6] KDTV was the Bay Area's first full-time Spanish station; two other channels broadcast Spanish-language programs, KEMO channel 20 and KGSC channel 36.^[7]

KDTV did not remain on channel 60 for long. Desirous of a lower channel number, in early 1977, the station approached the College of San Mateo, which owned KCSM-TV, a small educational station in San Mateo.^[8] The trade, which the college approved that March, gave KDTV a lower channel number and KCSM-TV, then with anemic technical facilities, full-power coverage of the Bay Area and $400,000 in equipment.^[9] The swap took place on the morning of March 5, 1979.^[10][11]

The station grew in the 1980s with Emilio Nicolas Jr., son of Emilio Nicolas Sr., as general manager. Its relief efforts in the aftermath of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake won the station a Peabody Award and an Emmy nomination for community service, the first one for a Spanish-language TV station in the United States.^[13]

In 1997, prompted by the growing Hispanic population in the Bay Area and the need to expand, KDTV moved its studios and offices to the 41st floor of 50 Fremont Center in downtown San Francisco (today known as Salesforce West), a relocation that one Univision executive noted changed San Francisco from the worst facility in the network to its best.^[14] The station's current transmitter sites also took shape, with the opening of the then-KDTV-LP in Santa Rosa and the move of the main transmitter to Mount Allison that year.^[14] In 2001, Univision further expanded its Santa Rosa presence and opened an office there.^[15]

In 2016, the station moved into a new, state-of-the-art studio facility in San Jose to reduce the cost of doing business (which had become prohibitive in the city of San Francisco) and increase its focus on the expanding Hispanic population to the south in Santa Clara County. KDTV had previously maintained a bureau on Old Oakland Road.^[16] The station retains a smaller bureau in San Francisco covering news in the city, along with the northern and eastern portions of the region.^[17]

The station's lone local programming at launch was an early evening local newscast.^[6] When Luis Echegoyén—who became one of KDTV's longtime anchors—arrived for an interview before the station launched in 1975, he instead found Anselmo painting a wall.^[14] In 1976, Enrique Gratas—later the anchor of Univision's network late news and Ocurrió Así on Telemundo—was named news director, being promoted to KMEX in 1978.^[18] His replacement, Guillermo Descalzi, later left KDTV for various SIN network posts, including head of the network's census registration program,^[19] national correspondent, and an eight-year stint as the host of Temas y Debates, the network's Sunday morning political program.^[20]

It was not until December 1996 that KDTV launched an 11 p.m. newscast.^[21] By 2000, the station's news ratings were on the rise and beating the English-language stations among younger viewers.^[22] In November 2007, KDTV had the highest-rated newscast in the Bay Area among adults 25 to 54 in the 6 p.m. timeslot. This was the first occurrence in the market in which a Spanish-language news program earned higher ratings than those of its English-language counterparts.^[23]

Subchannels edit

The stations' signals are multiplexed, with KDTV-CD additionally carrying two subchannels of KFSF-DT:

Analog-to-digital conversion edit

KDTV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 14, on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television.^[26] The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 51, using virtual channel 14.

After the 2016 incentive auction, multicultural independent station KTSF entered a channel sharing agreement with KDTV, after the station sold its spectrum in 2018.

• Official website (in Spanish)
• Information on KDTV-CD:
  • Licensing and Management System
  • Public file