KTEN (channel 10) is a television station licensed to Ada, Oklahoma, United States, serving the Sherman, Texas–Ada, Oklahoma market as an affiliate of NBC, The CW Plus, and ABC. The station is owned by Lockwood Broadcast Group, and maintains primary studios on High Point Circle (near Katy Memorial Expressway/US 75) in northwestern Denison, Texas, with secondary studios at the Ardmore Energy Center on Merrick Drive (near North Commerce Street) in northwestern Ardmore. Its transmitter is located along State Highway 7 in rural northeastern Johnston County, Oklahoma (west of Wapanucka and southwest of Bromide).
History
Early history
KTEN's history traces back to 1952, when Eastern Oklahoma Television Inc.—a locally based company owned by Bill Hoover, C. C. Morris and Brown Morris, who also owned radio stations KADA (1230 AM) in Ada and KWSH (1260 AM) in Wewoka through their Oklahoma Broadcasting Company subsidiary – applied with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for a license to operate a television station on VHF channel 12 (the 1952 assignment of the frequency to the Sherman–Ada media market under the Sixth Report and Order consequently resulted in the FCC also moving the channel 12 allocation originally assigned to Waco, Texas westward to Abilene—where it would become occupied by present-day ABC affiliate KTXS-TV—to avoid interference with any Sherman–Ada station that would be assigned to that channel). Hoover's firm purchased a plot of land located north of Ada with the intention to build a studio and transmitter facility for the station, for which it originally filed to use KEO as its call letters. Shortly after the FCC granted the license application to the Hoover group (now given the call letters KEOK) in 1953, Eastern Oklahoma Television reached an agreement with the FCC to assign its proposed station to VHF channel 10, a second television frequency allocated to the Sherman–Ada market under the Report and Order memorandum; the group subsequently applied to use KTEN as its call sign, becoming the first applicant to incorporate their station's channel number into its call letters in an FCC license filing.
The station first signed on the air on June 1, 1954, as the first television station to sign on in the Ada–Sherman market, Originally based out of studio facilities located on Arlington Street in Ada (which continues to serve as its city of license to this day), channel 10 originally maintained a primary affiliation with ABC, with programming from NBC airing on a secondary basis; this was very unusual for a two-station market, especially a small DMA the size of Sherman–Ada. During the late 1950s, it was also briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network. Prior to the sign-on of KTEN, Texoma area residents were only available to receive over-the-air television service via stations based in the adjacent Oklahoma City, Dallas–Fort Worth and Wichita Falls–Lawton markets; even still, these stations only provided Grade B coverage at best in the northern and western counties of south-central Oklahoma and in parts of north-central Texas; reception of these fringe stations requiring a strong outdoor antenna in Ardmore, Tishomingo and Sulphur, Oklahoma, Gainesville and Denison, Texas, and surrounding areas.
Among KTEN's earliest personalities was Churches of Christ televangelist Mack Lyon, who began his television career with channel 10 as a producer and speaker for a religious program which aired on the station. It was the first regularly scheduled television program produced by the ministry. From the fall of 1980 until 1982, during the tail end of his tenure as the church's pastor, Lyon hosted a weekly ministry program by the Wewoka Church of Christ that also aired locally on KTEN. Lyon would become known among national audiences after he started In Search of the Lord's Way, a syndicated weekly program that he developed as a television outreach of the Edmond Church of Christ in 1982, which Lyon hosted until 2016; in addition to its carriage on local commercial and independent religious television stations throughout North America, Search also aired nationally on the now-defunct American Christian Television System (ACTS) during the early- and mid-1990s.