KTSF (channel 26) is an independent television station in San Francisco, California, United States, broadcasting in a variety of languages, most notably Chinese.

The station is owned by the Lincoln Broadcasting Company and maintains studios on Valley Drive in south suburban Brisbane.

In 1989, KTSF began producing the first Chinese-language television newscast in the United States, airing in Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese.

[2][3] No station emerged, and in 1962, another group filed for the channel: Automated Electronics, Inc.[4] The company, based in Dallas, attempted to start stations in Dallas, San Francisco, and other cities carrying business news information, but its assets were purchased in late 1963 by Ultrasonic Research and Testing Laboratories, which had no broadcasting operations.

[8] Meanwhile, the channel lay fallow, and KTSF-TV continued to exist only on paper,[9] holding rights to begin broadcasting from the new Sutro Tower.

[14] In February 1977, after paying KEMO-TV (channel 20) to withdraw its application, KTSF won the right to broadcast subscription programming in the Bay Area.

From 7 p.m. until early morning hours, the station would broadcast a lineup consisting primarily of movies only to paying Super Time subscribers.

[28] On January 4, 1983, the general manager of Star TV in San Francisco informed his 70 employees that it would be acquired by Willamette Subscription Television of Portland, Oregon, which had been operating an ON TV–branded service on KECH-TV serving that city; at the time, the company was losing 750 customers a month, and the general manager reported that a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing was imminent.

[37] Asian Journal, a weekly public affairs series rotating between issues of concern to different Asian-American communities in the Bay Area, debuted in 1985.

The money was used to consolidate offices split between China Basin and San Bruno Mountain at a new site in Brisbane, a southern suburb.

In 1987, Sam Speer's horse racing reports, which had aired for a time on KCSM-TV, moved from KSTS back to KTSF after many Bay Area cable systems dropped the former station.

[43] A significant step in the station's history came in 1987 when it hired a research firm to detail the consumer habits of the Chinese-American community in the Bay Area.

In February, the station cut back the air time of the Filipino-language Filipino Report after less than two years to replace it with the ABS-CBN current affairs magazine Balitang K, which had a tabloid format; two journalists at KTSF resigned in protest,[48] and community leaders threatened a boycott.

[55] KTSF's efforts to broaden its advertiser appeal continued in the 1990s and 2000s, as the Asian-American population in the Bay Area experienced further growth.

Channel 26's major advertisers included such blue-chip names as AT&T, Bank of America, Disney, JCPenney, Nissan, and United Airlines.

[44] Lillian Lincoln Howell continued to be involved in the station well into her 80s, still attending weekly meetings in spite of slowly losing her hearing.

In 2003, it marketed Road Trip USA, a Mandarin-language reality game show in which four Chinese teams would race from Boston to Miami;[59] a year later, channel 26 debuted Stir, an English-language program.

[63] As part of the SAFER Act, KTSF kept its analog signal on the air until June 26 to inform viewers of the digital television transition through a loop of public service announcements from the National Association of Broadcasters.

[68] In 2021, KTSF was the most-viewed station on VUit, attracting out-of-market viewership in a number of other West Coast media markets.

[70] Lincoln Broadcasting took a payment of more than $90.1 million to surrender its channel in the reverse portion of the 2016 United States wireless spectrum auction.

[71] In the wake of the auction, KTSF entered into a channel-sharing agreement with Univision-owned KDTV-DT (channel 14), which broadcasts from Mount Allison.

KTSF's non-multicultural broadcasting is limited to several religious programs, including Shepherd's Chapel and two weekly Catholic Masses.

Sze, who had recently emigrated from Hong Kong, was working as a bank teller when she was approached to help start KTSF's newsroom.

During the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre later in 1989, the station was able to track down Fang Lizhi, an activist, before he sought asylum; news outlets around the world picked up the story.