to include UHF tuners until 1964 as a result of the passage of the All-Channel Receiver Act. Additionally, several portions of San Diego County are very mountainous, and UHF signals do not carry very well across rugged terrain. Complicating matters, the Mexican authorities had allocated two VHF channels to neighboring Tijuana – channels 6 and 12. Since these were the last two VHF channels left in the area, the FCC did not accept any new construction permits from San Diego as a courtesy to Mexican authorities. One of the frequencies, channel 6, had originally been assigned to San Diego before the freeze; it was reassigned to Mexico as a result of the Sixth Report and Order. Although San Diego was large enough to support three television stations, it soon became obvious that the only way to get a third VHF station on the air would be to use one of Tijuana's allocations. The Azcárraga family, owners of Telesistema Mexicano (the forerunner of Televisa), quickly snapped up the concession for channel 6, and signed XETV on the air on April 29, 1953. It is the San Diego area's second-oldest television station after KFMB-TV, which began operations on May 16, 1949. At its launch, XETV was an independent station, broadcasting programs in both English and Spanish from its studio facilities in Tijuana. Channel 6 also established a business office on Park Boulevard in the University Heights section of San Diego, which handled sales accounts from north of the border. The Azcárragas chose to focus XETV toward San Diego and its English-speaking audience because there were more households in that side of the market that had television sets at the time than there were in Tijuana, which did not get its own all-Spanish station until 1960 when the Azcárragas signed on sister station XEWT-TV (channel 12). Owing to its initial bilingual, bi-national audience, XETV billed itself as "The International Station" during its early years. Joining ABC (1953–1973) In January 1953, former ABC programming executive Alvin George Flanagan filed an application with the FCC to supply programming to XETV via microwave relay from San Diego. Flanagan's request was neither approved nor denied and he took a position with Los Angeles station KLAC-TV (now KCOP-TV) in early 1954. A subsequent petition by ABC to allow it to transmit network programming across the Mexican border to XETV via microwave relay was approved in November 1955. Pending