KUSA (channel 9) is a television station in Denver, Colorado, United States, affiliated with NBC. It is owned by Tegna Inc. alongside MyNetworkTV affiliate KTVD (channel 20). Both stations share studios on East Speer Boulevard in Denver's Speer neighborhood, while KUSA's transmitter is located atop Lookout Mountain, near Golden. In addition to its main studios, the station also operates a secondary studio and news bureau on Riverside Avenue in Fort Collins. History Early years to the mid-1990s The station first signed on the air on October 12, 1952, as KBTV; it was the second television station to sign on in the Denver market—after KFEL-TV (channel 2, now KWGN-TV), which signed on just over three months earlier on July 18. Founded by Mullins Broadcasting, the station initially served as a primary affiliate of CBS, but also carried programs from ABC and NBC through secondary affiliations with both networks. It originally operated from studio facilities located in a converted former car dealership at 1089 Bannock Street in Denver's Civic Center neighborhood. Channel 9 gained an affiliation with the DuMont Television Network in 1953, but lost CBS programming to KLZ-TV (channel 7, now KMGH-TV) when that station signed on in November of that year; this was followed by the loss of the NBC affiliation to KOA-TV (channel 4, now KCNC-TV) when it signed on a month later (both KLZ-TV and KOA-TV inherited the affiliations as a result of their sister radio stations' respective longtime affiliations with the CBS Radio Network and the NBC Red Network). This left KBTV as a primary DuMont and secondary ABC affiliate. It would become a full-time ABC affiliate when DuMont ceased operations in 1956. Its radio news partner was KBTR (now KNUS); both stations were owned by Mullins Broadcasting, and the radio partnership lasted until the mid-1980s. In 1972, Mullins Broadcasting sold KBTV and sister station KARK-TV (channel 4) in Little Rock, Arkansas, to the Combined Communications Corporation, owned jointly by Phoenix advertising mogul Karl Eller and Chicago advertiser John J. Louis Sr., which already owned its flagship advertising business and stations KTAR-AM and KTAR-TV (channel 12, now KPNX-TV). Combined's station properties would eventually be merged into the Gannett Company seven years later in May 1978, in what was the largest media merger in United States history at the time. In order to align itself with Gannett's new newspaper entity USA Today, the station changed its call letters