BOISE, Idaho — KIDO-TV (which later changed its call letters at KTVB in 1959) first went on the air in July 1953.
At the time, television sets were just starting to become popular. Most households didn't have a television set, so there wasn't wall-to-wall news coverage like there is today.
When KIDO-TV signed on, we did just 15 minutes of news and weather every day. The studio, and its transmitter, were both located on Crestline Drive in the Boise foothills.
"When we turned on the switch in 1953, we barely reached Payette, Idaho,” former general manager Robert E. Krueger said.
Our up-and-coming competitor, who hadn't signed on just yet, immediately took notice.
"Channel 2 immediately, when we went there, they immediately modified their application to the FCC. And they moved up to the top of Bogus Basin, which we gradually had to do I made to be competitive," Krueger said.
That forced KIDO-TV to move the transmitter up to Deer Point in the late 1950s. As our local reach improved, we still unable to access any national feeds.
So, we came up with a solution.
“We worked with Channel 2, and we developed a microwave system between Boise and Salt Lake City,” Krueger said.
Here's how that worked: The signal started in Salt Lake City. It jumped over the Great Salt Lake and into Albion, Idaho. From there, the signal went to Twin Falls, then to Deer Point, then to Boise, all at the speed of light.
That microwave signal allowed KIDO-TV to start broadcasting live network shows. At the time, we only had one 'link' to access those feeds, so we shared it.
“We worked with them as to what programs and what programs we would before we got a dual system going back and forth another microwave,” Krueger said. “And the first live telecast was a Friday night's fight.”
It wouldn't be until the late 1970s when KTVB broadcast the very first live shot in the state of Idaho.
In August 1978, President Jimmy Carter landed at the Boise Airport for a trip down the Middle Fork of the Salmon River with his family.
“That was the first live shot in Idaho history," former KTVB News Director Rod Gramer said. "Sal (Celeski) had arranged a microwave feedback to the station. And it made history.”
So how did that work?
Celeski and a photographer drove out to the Boise Airport in our news van. When they got there, they put a microwave dish on top of the van. They then pointed it to our transmitter at Deer Point.
From there, an engineer aligned the dish to receive the signal before transferring it back down to the KTVB studio.
So why not just aim the dish directly at the studio?
The dishes need a 'line of sight' in order to work. If there isn't one, the dish will be aimed at Deer Point because of its height, then transfer the signal back down.
"If you had a line of sight to deer point, the top of you know bogus basin, you could get a live shot done," explained Paul Budell, the current director of technology and operations at KTVB.
Live shots evolved from there.
"Today, we can do microwave live shots, we can do satellite live shots, and we can do bonded cellular from anywhere in the country,” Budell said. Today, we use what is called 'TVU' packs, which are backpacks with cellular chips inside.
“Live television is unpredictable, you never really know what the outcome is going to be sometimes," Budell said. "It's magical.”
From live television to capturing images, the way we do it continues to evolve. When we first went on air in 1953, everything came from eight or 16-millimeter film from a Kinescope camera.
It was a way to record a broadcast onto a film reel. It did so by pointing a camera at a monitor as it played the footage. The footage was usually poor quality and grainy.
"We used to have a darkroom here," Budell said. "Photographers had to go out and shoot film, bring it back, process it, and then pass it to video, or air it live through what was called a 'film chain' - and a film chain was basically a projector that projected the image onto a mirror. And there was a little camera that would see that image on a mirror and convert it to video. It would just record it.”
"When I arrived here in 1975, we were all shooting film," former KTVB anchor Larry Taylor said. "And so, you go out with your sound cameras and shoot your story, then you have to come back, put it in the film processor, which was always a gamble."
"Get it out of the processor, and then physically edit and splice the film together. And if you had if you wanted to cover a talking head with some video, you had to make a B-roll on a separate roll," said Taylor.
Taylor adds, "Then this was all assembled on the air live. I mean, when it came time for your story, they're running this film chain, they're running the B-roll to put in the receiver if everything comes together live on the air. If you're lucky, and we weren't always lucky."
With the introduction of videotape in the late 1970s, newsgathering became quicker, but the equipment was still big and heavy.
“It was an arduous process to do that every single day to gather news," Budell said. "The video cameras that we shot and filled with though were these big honkin', heavy things that made your shoulder hurt."
"There are a lot of photographers who ended up leaving the business who were good photographers at the time who had pretty major shoulder damage because they were heavy and then the tripods were heavy," former KTVB Director of Innovation Xanti Alcelay said.
"And then you had a big deck that recorded the three-quarter inch videotape. And you're editing what was called tape-to-tape in kind of a linear fashion," Budell said.
"It's come a long way. I mean, just looking at these cameras now. Those look so much smaller than what we had when we first went," Alcelay said.
"It was a lot of work. But the fact that it had to all come together on the air live is what is interesting looking back on, because I mean, now you go into the editing booth and do your story and they just push a button when they need it," Taylor added.
"It took probably four or five hours to process the film that had been shot the night before which had to be done before it could be edited," former KTVB Sports Director Larry Maneely said.
These days, ingesting and editing video takes just minutes to do; and technology has become so advanced that news stories can even be shot and edited with just a smartphone.
One of the biggest projects KTVB has undertaken in the last 70 years? Making the switch from analog to digital in 2009. This government-mandated transition required all of our transmitter stations around the region to be manually adjusted for the switch.
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