The Little Rock–Pine Bluff market includes 38 counties in the central, north-central and west-central portions of the state, serving a total population of 1,172,700 residents ages 12 and over as of 2021[update].
The first television station to operate in Arkansas, KRTV (channel 17), signed on from Little Rock on April 4, 1953; however, the station faltered mainly because it transmitted on the then-unviable UHF band, as television sets were not required to be manufactured with built-in UHF tuners at the time of its sign-on (requiring a more expensive external tuner to be able to view KRTV's signal).
In April 1954, KRTV forfeited its license to the Federal Communications Commission and sold its studio facility to Central-South Sales Co. to serve as an auxiliary studio for the state's first VHF station, KATV (channel 7), which began operations in Pine Bluff in December 1953 and moved its city of license to Little Rock in 1958.
(Couch loaned WOK's equipment to help start a student-run station at Henderson-Brown College in Arkadelphia, where he was a trustee board member, in February 1924.
[26][28] KAAY (1090 AM) began operations on 800 AM in Hot Springs in December 1924; the station, which became an NBC Blue (later ABC Radio) affiliate in March 1929 and switched to CBS Radio in June 1953 (along with a short-lived secondary Mutual affiliation from 1938 to 1939), was reassigned to Little Rock—following an aborted attempt in 1949 to relocate it to West Memphis—and became the state's first 50,000-watt clear channel station—relocating its transmitter to a tower in Wrightsville, which produced a nighttime signal that covered much of the Great Plains and Mississippi Valley regions and could be received as far as parts of Cuba—in March 1953.
[29] Following its 1962 purchase by LIN Broadcasting, the rechristened KAAY switched to an innovative mixed format for the time of top 40 music, news and agricultural reports, and religious programs; KAAY became known for its Arkansas Razorbacks football broadcasts and for being the originating station of Beaker Street, an underground music program that gained a cult following throughout the Central United States during its 1966–72 run.
(The station, now KTUV, switched to a Spanish-language variety format in 2006; the KOKY call letters and format—which also incorporates the all-day Saturday blues and Sunday gospel blocks that originated on the AM station—now reside on 102.1 FM.
On February 21, 2022, Cumulus Media (which acquired ARN through its 2011 purchase of Citadel Broadcasting) announced plans to suspend the network's operations effective March 20.
1 KMYA-LD is a translator of KMYA-DT in Camden; although KMYA-DT brands itself as a Little Rock station and is officially assigned by Nielsen to the Little Rock–Pine Bluff DMA, the station's transmitter is based in Union County (located four miles [6.4 km] northwest of El Dorado), which is within the boundaries of the El Dorado–Monroe, Louisiana market, and its signal contour extends as far north into the Little Rock–Pine Bluff DMA as Dallas, Cleveland and Clark counties.