KWCH-DT (channel 12) is a television station licensed to Hutchinson, Kansas, United States, serving the Wichita area as an affiliate of CBS. It is owned by Gray Television alongside CW affiliate KSCW-DT (channel 33) and maintains studios on 37th Street North in northeast Wichita and a transmitter facility located east of Hutchinson in rural northeastern Reno County. KWCH-DT serves as the flagship of the Kansas Broadcasting System (KBS), a network of four full-power stations that relay CBS network and other programming provided by KWCH across central and western Kansas, as well as bordering counties in Colorado, Nebraska and Oklahoma. The station was established as KTVH in Hutchinson on July 1, 1953, and was the first television station built within the state. Though based in Hutchinson until 1978, when the main studio was officially moved to Wichita, it has had a presence in that city since 1954. The KBS network took its present form in the early 1960s. KTVH was the third-rated news outlet in the area until the owners of two of the other three KBS stations purchased it, changed the call letters to KWCH in 1983, and successfully led it to first place in the local ratings. History KTVH On June 30, 1952, Wichita-Hutchinson Company, Inc., filed an application for a construction permit to build channel 12 in Hutchinson, which the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted on January 8, 1953. The company was composed of several shareholders from Hutchinson and other Kansas cities, including Ray Dillon of the Dillons grocery store family; local car dealer J. C. Child; W. D. P. Carey, whose family owned salt mines; the publisher of The Hutchinson News-Herald; and the owner of radio station KWBW. The call letters KTVH were selected; a tract of land on Plum Street was purchased for studio facilities; and a tower site selected east of town. The first test pattern went out on June 24, 1953, ahead of July 1, when the station launched as the first commercial television station based in Kansas. KTVH was the first television station to open that covered Wichita, the state's largest city, and recognized that much of its viewing audience would be in the air capital. In August 1954, channel 12 opened a satellite studio in Wichita's Lassen Hotel. Its attempts to provide service to Wichita, in what would become a running theme in the first three decades of station history, rankled the