page_title: KCTS-TV
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: KCTS-TV / History
caption_attribution_description: English: A crew from KCTS, the public television station in Seattle, interviews Dennis Kelso, commissioner of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, during the cleanup of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill.
context_page_description: KCTS-TV, virtual and VHF digital channel 9, is a Public Broadcasting Service member television station licensed to Seattle, Washington, United States and also serving Tacoma. The station is owned by Cascade Public Media. KCTS-TV's studios are located at the northeast corner of Seattle Center, and its transmitter is located on Capitol Hill in Seattle.
  KYVE in Yakima operates as a semi-satellite of KCTS-TV, serving as the PBS member station for the western portion of the Yakima/Tri-Cities market. KYVE maintains its own studios on Second Street in Yakima and transmitter on Ahtanum Ridge.
context_section_description: KCTS first went on the air on December 7, 1954, broadcasting from the campus of the University of Washington, the station's original licensee, and using equipment donated by KING-TV owner Dorothy Bullitt. Channel 9 was a sister station to KUOW-FM, which the University of Washington put on the air two years earlier.
  During the 1950s and 1960s, KCTS primarily supplied classroom instructional programs used in Washington State's K–12 schools, plus National Educational Television (NET) programs. Outside of schoolrooms, KCTS' audience among the general public was somewhat limited, and most programming was in black-and-white until the mid-1970s (although the station did install color capability in 1967).
  In 1970, NET was absorbed into the newly-created Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which commenced broadcasting on October 5. As a PBS member station, KCTS began offering a vastly enhanced scope of programming for the general public, including British programming.
  Thanks to a major fundraiser drive during the mid-1980s, KCTS moved to its present location on the Seattle Center campus in October 1986; shortly after, in 1987, the University of Washington spun off KCTS, and the station became a community licensee, thus separating it from KUOW-FM.
  KCTS is seen throughout southwestern British Columbia on local cable systems, as well as across Canada on the Bell Satellite TV and Shaw Direct satellite providers, as well as on many other Canadian cable TV systems. According to KCTS, around 2 million viewers from Canada tune in each week. KCTS receives substantial financial support from its far-flung Canadian audience as well as from viewers in Washington State.
  In January 2016, as part of a broader strategy redefine itself as a content provider for various other platforms other than television, the name of the licensee, KCTS Television became Cascade Public Media; its properties included KCTS-TV, Crosscut, a non-profit daily news site, and Spark Public. Cascade Public Media currently consists of KCTS, Crosscut and Piranha Partners.
caption: KCTS crew recording an interview with Dennis Kelso, then-commissioner of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, during the cleanup of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989.
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