KPRC-TV (channel 2) is a television station in Houston, Texas, United States, affiliated with NBC and owned by Graham Media Group.

[8] Over the years, the Hobby family bought several other television stations, including KVOA-TV in Tucson, KCCI in Des Moines, WTVF in Nashville, WESH in Orlando, and KSAT-TV in San Antonio.

In March 1972, KPRC-TV moved into a new state-of-the-art studio facility in the Sharpstown area (then part of unincorporated Harris County) where it operated from for 45 years.

Built on property originally lent to Houston Baptist University, KPRC-TV chose the site to build its new facilities in large part due to its location on the feeder road of the Southwest Freeway.

In 1983, the Hobbys sold the Houston Post to MediaNews Group, while the family's broadcast holdings were reorganized as H&C Communications, with KPRC-AM-TV remaining as the flagship stations.

After 40 years under Hobby family ownership, KPRC-TV was sold to The Washington Post Company on April 22, 1994; an attempt to sell the station to Young Broadcasting in 1992 was unsuccessful.

From 1986 to 1993, KPRC-TV filled Wheel's 6:30 p.m. slot with various syndicated revivals of Hollywood Squares, Family Feud and You Bet Your Life before settling on Entertainment Tonight in 1993.

The station also gained a reputation from the 1980s well into the early 2000s for airing various syndicated tabloid talk shows that often fit the pejorative definition of "Trash TV".

After Post-Newsweek acquired the station, KPRC-TV nonetheless began broadcasting more syndicated talk shows in the afternoon including ones hosted by Montel Williams, Maury Povich, Jenny Jones, Ricki Lake and Jerry Springer, as well as infotainment news programs such as A Current Affair, Hard Copy, Extra, Access Hollywood and Inside Edition.

On August 23, 2016, KPRC-TV began airing a daily lifestyle and entertainment program called Houston Life and featured Jennifer Broome and Derrick Shore as hosts.

Despite NBC historically being less tolerant of preemptions than other networks, KPRC-TV has at times preempted programming particularly in late night and daytime hours.

Following its acquisition by Post-Newsweek, various programs have been preempted by KPRC-TV over the years in a pattern similar to that of its Detroit sister station, WDIV-TV.

Most notorious of all, the station dropped Late Night with Conan O'Brien from 1994 to 1996, leaving Houston as the largest market in the country to not air the program, with reruns of various tabloid talk shows including the aforementioned Ricki Lake and Jenny Jones, tabloid news programs such as Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, and even a repeat of KPRC-TV's 10 p.m. newscast often filling the void.

KPRC-TV responded by moving the show to 12:35 a.m. in 1998, and finally to its network-recommended (for the Central Time Zone) 11:35 p.m. slot in 2005, where Late Night, now hosted by Seth Meyers, continues to air.

As is the case with Detroit's WDIV, NBC's current overnight lineup (a rebroadcast of the fourth hour of Today on weekdays; LXTV 1st Look and Open House NYC on weekends) also does not air in Houston.

During the team's final years in Houston, the Oilers failed to sell out many home games, subjecting them to in-market television blackouts under league rules at the time in addition to preemption from radio broadcasts locally.

Channel 2 also aired Houston Rockets games via NBC's broadcast contract with the NBA from 1990 to 2002, including the team's championship victories in 1994 and 1995.

In September 2007, the first half-hour of the NFL Kickoff game between the New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts was shown on KPRC-TV with default audio in Spanish rather than English.

[16] KPRC inadvertently aired the secondary audio program feed provided by Telemundo (owned by NBC parent company NBCUniversal).

[17] In 1973, after Smith departed for KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh (at the time, a larger market than Houston), the station hired former KHOU anchor Ron Stone and paired him with weatherman Doug Johnson and sportscaster Bill Worrell (who had formerly co-anchored the news with Rasco) for its evening newscasts, then known as Big 2 News (Smith would eventually return to Houston as the lead anchor at KHOU in 1975).

From 1985 to 1992, the station's newscasts were branded as ChannelTwoNews, broadcasting round-the-clock news updates throughout the day, including during NBC prime time shows.

This set was referred to as the "News Center" and was used on-air until 2006, even though the physical newsroom continued to exist until the move to its current facilities in 2017.

By 2012, the station's 6 p.m. newscast had ratings gains, boasting its highest viewership in November and December, as well as significant increases in all other time periods; the 10 p.m. broadcast also grew, besting KTRK for first in the timeslot for several consecutive months that year.

Gutierrez, in between his stints for KPRC-TV, was a Fox News Channel correspondent and an anchor for WBBM-TV in Chicago, as well as for NBC owned-and-operated station KXAS-TV in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex.

[35] In the 1980–82 NBC soap opera Texas, which was set primarily in Houston, the series made several mentions of fictional television station "KVIK", run by one of the show's characters.

A brief view of the exterior of KPRC-TV's studio facility, which was marked with a "KVIK" sign out front, can be seen during a later version of the show's opening title sequence.

One episode of the series features a scene in which two characters are conversing while walking down a second-floor hallway at "KVIK" (which was filmed at the KPRC building) that overlooks the first-floor lobby.

[citation needed] As part of the SAFER Act,[38][39] KPRC kept its analog signal on the air until July 12 to inform viewers of the digital television transition through a loop of public service announcements from the National Association of Broadcasters.