KGCW
KGCW, virtual channel 26, is a CW-affiliated television station licensed to Burlington, Iowa, United States, serving the Quad Cities area of southeastern Iowa and northwestern Illinois. The station is owned by Nexstar Media Group, as part of a duopoly with Rock Island, Illinois-licensed CBS affiliate WHBF-TV ; Nexstar also operates Davenport, Iowa-licensed Fox affiliate KLJB under a shared services agreement with owner Marshall Broadcasting Group. The three stations share studios in the Telco Building on 18th Street in downtown Rock Island; master control and some internal operations are based at the facilities of Nexstar sister station WROC-TV in Rochester, New York. KGCW's transmitter is located near Orion, Illinois.
On cable, KGCW is available on Mediacom channel 13 in standard definition and digital channel 713 in high definition.
History
Early history
The station signed-on January 6, 1988 as KJMH. It aired an analog signal on UHF channel 26 with an effective radiated power of 200 kilowatts from a tower on Winegard Drive in Burlington. KJMH quickly became a Fox affiliate, primarily serving the southern portion of the Quad Cities market. However, the station suffered interference and duplication from the area's other Fox affiliate, KLJB in Davenport serving the northern portions of the area. Finally in 1996, this station became a full-time satellite of KLJB. In 2001, KJMH broke off and became a WB affiliate for the Quad Cities and adopted the KGWB-TV call sign.In September 2006 as a result of The WB and UPN merging to form The CW, the station was picked as the new network affiliate for the Quad Cities. To reflect the change, KGWB adopted the KGCW-TV call letters on June 30, 2006. Meanwhile, the area's low-powered UPN affiliate WBQD-LP joined the other new service, News Corporation's MyNetworkTV. While broadcasting in analog, KGCW's signal failed to cover the Quad Cities adequately because WBQD also transmitted on channel 26. In addition, its coverage area was less than most full-powered UHF outlets in the United States due to its lower effective radiated power and antenna height. However, from 2001 to 2015, this shortfall had been made up by it being available on cable systems in the area through a fiber optic link and a simulcast on KLJB-DT2. During the Spring of 2015, however, the KGCW subchannel simulcast would migrate to WHBF-DT2.
Virtual triopoly with WHBF and KLJB
On November 6, 2013, Irving, Texas-based Nexstar Broadcasting Group announced that it would purchase the Grant Broadcasting stations—including KGCW and KLJB—for $87.5 million. Just six weeks prior on September 16, Nexstar had announced it was acquiring CBS affiliate WHBF-TV from Bronxville, New York-based Citadel Communications in an $88-million deal, in which Nexstar also assumed that station's operations through a time brokerage agreement. This precluded Nexstar from acquiring KLJB directly as Federal Communications Commission ownership regulations prohibited common ownership of two of the four highest-rated television stations in the same media market; Nexstar originally intended to address the conflict by spinning off KLJB to Westlake, Ohio-based partner company Mission Broadcasting, with the intent of taking over that station's operations through a shared services agreement.However, on June 6, 2014, Nexstar announced that it would instead sell KLJB to Houston-based Marshall Broadcasting Group—a newly formed, minority-controlled company headed by Pluria Marshall Jr.—for $58.5 million. While Marshall acquired much of channel 18's assets, Nexstar entered into a shared services agreement to provide non-programming resources and advertising sales for KLJB and Marshall's two other stations. The sale was completed on December 1, 2014.
In November 2014, while Nexstar was still waiting for the completion of its sale of KLJB to Marshall Broadcasting, there was speculation by other local media that KGCW might move to a digital subchannel of WHBF-TV. On May 14, 2015, Nexstar relaunched WHBF's 4.2 subchannel with a standard definition simulcast of KGCW. The simulcast had previously aired on KLJB's 18.2 subchannel, but was moved to the WHBF subchannel due to the sale of KLJB to Marshall Broadcasting.
On December 3, 2018, Nexstar announced it would acquire the assets of Chicago-based Tribune Media—which has owned ABC affiliate WQAD-TV since December 2013—for $6.4 billion in cash and debt. Nexstar is precluded from acquiring WQAD directly or indirectly, as FCC regulations prohibit common ownership of more than two stations in the same media market, or two or more of the four highest-rated stations in the market. As such, Nexstar will be required to sell either WQAD or both WHBF and KLJB to separate, unrelated companies to address the ownership conflict. KGCW could either be retained by Nexstar or sold to the new buyer if WHBF is sold, as KGCW does not rank among the four highest-rated stations in the Quad Cities market.
On March 20, 2019, it was announced that Nexstar would keep WHBF-TV, KGCW and the SSA for KLJB and sell WQAD to McLean, Virginia-based Tegna Inc., as part of the company's sale of nineteen Nexstar- and Tribune-operated stations to Tegna and the E. W. Scripps Company in separate deals worth $1.32 billion; this would make WQAD the first television property in Iowa for Tegna and its first television property in Illinois since the group sold WREX in Rockford, Illinois to the Gilmore Broadcasting Corporation in 1969.
Digital television
Digital channels
The station's digital signal is multiplexed:| Channel | Video | Aspect | PSIP Short Name | Programming |
| 26.1 | 720p | KGCWDT1 | Main KGCW programming / The CW | |
| 26.2 | 480i | KGCWDT2 | This TV | |
| 26.3 | 480i | Laff | Laff | |
| 26.4 | 480i | Bounce | Bounce TV |
On December 10, 2009, KGCW added a new second subchannel of its own carrying This TV. It also added MeTV to a new subchannel on April 10, 2012.
Analog-to-digital conversion
In December 2009, it finally changed the PSIP identifier for the main channel on 26.1 from its pre-transition labeling of "KGCW-DT" to its current legal call sign "KGCW" without the "-DT" suffix in it. KGCW shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 26, at noon on February 17, 2009, the original date in which full-power television stations in the United States were to transition from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 41. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 26. It transferred the "KGCW-TV" calls from its now-defunct analog signal channel 26 to its digital signal on channel 41 and the "KGCW-DT" call sign was discontinued.However, it changed the legal Federal Communications Commission call sign again to KGCW around the revised digital transition date in June 2009 while continuing to use "KGCW-DT" through PSIP to identify channel 26.1 all the way up until December 2009. The current digital signal had been on-the-air from a new transmitter site near north of Seaton since November 2008 and from the station's original Burlington site on Winegard Drive prior to that. The remainder of the television stations in the Quad Cities terminated analog signals on the new analog shutoff date, June 12.