KMYA-DT (channel 49) is a television station licensed to Camden, Arkansas, United States, serving the Little Rock area as an affiliate of MeTV.
KMYA-LD (channel 25) in Sheridan operates as a low-power translator of KMYA-DT for the immediate Little Rock metropolitan area; its transmitter is located at the Shinall Mountain antenna farm, near the city's Chenal Valley neighborhood.
The station traces its existence to K22FA (channel 22, now Univision affiliate KLRA-CD on channel 20), a low-power station serving the immediate Little Rock area that was founded by the locally based Kaleidoscope Affiliates LLC (founded by Larry E. Morton, and renamed Equity Broadcasting Corporation in 1998), which received Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval for the construction permit on May 5, 1995.
The full-power channel 49—for which the construction permit, filed on March 31, 1997, was granted to Equity by the FCC on August 20, 1998[5][6]—first signed on the air in Camden on June 7, 1999, as KKYK-TV, with KKYK-LP becoming its repeater.
On January 4, 2009, the station lost access to Retro Television Network programming amid a dispute over a service contract between Equity and Luken Communications (which had acquired RTN in June 2008, and moved RTN's operations to its headquarters in Chattanooga, Tennessee) that expired that morning without renewal,[14] resulting in Luken terminating the network's agreements with KKYK and the rest of its Equity-owned affiliates;[15] (RTN—under its new modified initialism, RTV—later affiliated with KATV, being carried on that station's second digital subchannel.)
On June 17, 2014, Ellis-Wilson sold KMYA-DT and KMYA-LP to I Squared Media LLC (principally owned by Stuttgart-based hotelier Shashwat Goyal) for $1.9 million; the sale received FCC approval on August 21, and was finalized on September 18.
[26][27] On January 5, 2016, I Square Media sold the KMYA stations to LR Telecasting LLC (owned by William Pollack, part-owner of Pollack/Belz Communications, and Gina Robbins) for $2.75 million.
The sale's completion was held up for 26 months amid a legal dispute filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas involving Soul of the South's investors as to whether I Square Media or Rock City Media LLC (which allegedly bought the station in 2014, but never filed a transfer application to the FCC) legally owned the KMYA licenses and how proceeds would be shared if the license was resold in the spectrum auction.
[28][29][30] KKYK-LP (then on channel 22) launched a news department on September 15, 1997, when it began producing an hour-long prime time newscast on Monday through Friday evenings.
)[32][33][34] The newscast ultimately struggled to build an audience, regularly losing a substantial share of its WB prime time lead-in (pulling in, at best, a 1 rating on certain nights) and even being outperformed by syndicated Friends reruns that followed the 9 p.m. broadcast starting in September 1998.
Krile stayed on as channel 49's public affairs director; however, 16 news staffers, who were not notified of the department's closure until they reported to work on September 6, were laid off—with Henry, Frankum and Jernigan having to serve the remainder of their contracts through early 2000.