KULR-TV
NBC television affiliate in Billings, Montana, United States
KULR-TV (channel 8) is a television station in Billings, Montana, United States, affiliated with NBC and owned by the Cowles Company. The station's studios are located on Overland Avenue in the Homestead Business Park section of Billings, and its transmitter is located on Coburn Hill southeast of downtown.
KULR-TV was the second TV station on the air in Billings; it began broadcasting as KGHL-TV, co-owned with KGHL radio, on March 15, 1958. The station was renamed KULR-TV in 1963 when it was separated from the radio stations. It was an ABC affiliate from 1969 to 1987, when it returned to NBC. KULR-TV was purchased by Max Media in 2004 and by Cowles in 2013. Since the late 1980s, its newscasts have been a distant second-place finisher to KTVQ.
History
The first channel 8 construction permit was awarded on November 21, 1952, to the Rudman-Hayutin Television Company, a consortium of two oil producers. M. B. Rudman surrendered other permits he owned with Hayutin in North Dakota in September 1953 in order to concentrate on the proposed Billings station, but after the company failed to respond to a letter from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) inquiring as to progress in construction, the FCC canceled the permit in March 1954.
KGHL-TV: Early years
The Midland Empire Broadcasting Company, owner of Billings radio station KGHL (790 AM), applied to the FCC in September 1955 for channel 8. The FCC granted the application on November 23, but it stayed the grant after KOOK-TV (channel 2), the city's other TV station, protested to the commission. In August, FCC hearing examiner James D. Cunningham recommended a grant of the Midland Empire application, noting that while the addition of a second station would cause some economic damage to KOOK-TV, the Billings market could sustain two stations.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “KULR-TV” is nBC television affiliate in Billings, Montana, United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through KULR-TV, television and affiliate, not as a finished interpretation.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6339599. Authority coordinates are 45.760, -108.455. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1958, 1963, 1969 and 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “KULR-TV” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.