The station first signed on the air on October 19, 1964, as KTEH, originally intended to serve the
South Bay. In the late 1990s, KTEH bought KCAH in
Watsonville, which was founded in 1989 to serve as the PBS station for the
Santa Cruz–
Salinas–
Montereymarket. Before being acquired by KQED, KTEH maintained a Technical Volunteer program, which allowed volunteers to learn how to operate cameras, audio, shading, directing, and other production and technical responsibilities, while minimizing its costs. These volunteers made up the technical crews for all of their pledge drives and auction programming, as well as other occasional live broadcasts.
In 2006,
KQED Inc. and the KTEH Foundation agreed to merge to form Northern California Public Broadcasting.[2] As a result of the merger, KCAH changed its call letters to KQET on August 12, 2007. Subsequently, on October 1, 2007, KQET, which became a satellite of KTEH following its acquisition of the station, switched programming sources from KTEH to KQED. KQET's programming is carried on the second
digital subchannel of KQED.
In December 2010, the Board of Directors of Northern California Public Broadcasting changed the organization's name to KQED Inc. KTEH shut down its studio on Schallenberger Road, moved its operations to the KQED studio in San Francisco, changed its call letters to KQEH, and rebranded itself as "KQED Plus" on July 1, 2011, after research found that most viewers were unaware that KTEH was related to KQED; other aspects of the station's operation, including programming and staff, were not affected by this change.[3]
Programming
In April 1981, KTEH started showing the British science-fantasy show Doctor Who, which ran on the station until January 2003. On April 10, 2007, Doctor Who returned to the station with the airing of the program's 2005 revival. KTEH has also aired another British sci-fi show, Red Dwarf. In 1998, KTEH aired the entire eighth series of Red Dwarf in one night. In doing so, many episodes were shown on KTEH before their broadcast on British television.[4][5]
In the mid-1990s,
Scott Apel hosted airings of The Prisoner with commentary, using an episode ordering he devised. The ordering is still a popular one in the Prisoner fandom, referred to as "
KTEH order".[citation needed]
KQEH (as KTEH) shut down its analog signal, over
UHF channel 54, on June 12, 2009, as part of the
federally mandated transition from analog to digital television.[21] The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 50, using
PSIP to display KQEH's
virtual channel as 54 on digital television receivers, which was among the high band UHF channels (52-69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition. On January 17, 2018, KQEH ceased broadcasting on UHF channel 50 from Monument Peak Tower near Milpitas, and moved to UHF channel 30 broadcasting from Sutro Tower in San Francisco, a frequency shared with KQED.[22]
^Antonucci, Mike (February 8, 1998). "Anime Magnetism Drawing Power of Japanese Animation Tapes, Festivals Makes Imprint on U.S. Culture". The Mercury News. Moreover, in a nod to the purists who want subtitles instead of dubbing, KTEH is running a block of four anime episodes in that format March 8, starting at 9 p.m. The program is Urusei Yatsura, a comedy about aliens who want to repossess the Earth and the luckless, lecherous lad who opposes them.