KWBM

KWBM (channel 31) is a religious television station licensed to Harrison, Arkansas, United States, serving the Springfield, Missouri, area as an owned-and-operated station of the Daystar Television Network. It is the only full-power television station in the Springfield market that is licensed in Arkansas. KWBM's offices are located on Enterprise Avenue in southeast Springfield, and its transmitter is located in rural Taney County, just northeast of Forsyth.

The station first signed on the air on January 26, 2001; it originally served as the market's affiliate of The WB. The station was founded by the Equity Broadcasting Corporation. Prior to the station's sign-on, southwestern Missouri residents could only receive WB network programs on cable and satellite through Chicago-based superstation WGN, which carried WB programming nationally from the network's launch on January 11, 1995; the network was unavailable in the market between the period when WGN dropped WB programming in October 1999^[2][3] and KWBM launched. The station formerly operated two low-power translator stations: KBBL-CA (channel 56, later KBBL-LP) in Springfield (which adopted the calls on July 14, 2006; coincidentally, the KBBL calls were used fictionally as the radio station in the fictional town of Springfield on the animated series The Simpsons), and KNJE-LP (channel 58) in Aurora.

On January 24, 2006, the

On December 8, 2008, Equity Media Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection; it then began to sell off its television station properties. KWBM was sold to at auction to religious broadcaster Daystar in early 2009; the MyNetworkTV affiliation later moved to upstart station KRBK (channel 49; now a Fox affiliate) when that station launched on August 1, 2009.

The station's digital signal is

Daystar leased the second and third subchannels of KWBM to Nexstar Media Group (formerly Koplar Communications) to extend the signal coverage of Fox affiliate KRBK, which until 2018 did not cover Springfield proper with its main signal licensed to Osage Beach, Missouri. What would usually be channel 31.2 instead remapped as a virtual channel to KRBK's channel 49.1. KWBM also broadcast KRBK's MeTV subchannel as 49.2.^[9] This arrangement ended in 2020 with the launch of the Daystar Español channel on KWBM-DT2. KRBK has since moved to the Fordland antenna farm.

Because it was granted an original

The termination of KWBM's analog signal resulted in the station being dropped from satellite providers

KBBL-LP and KNJE-LP, as low-power stations, were not required to cease analog transmissions upon the 2009 transition deadline, but were required to move their channel positions as their channel allocations were among the high band UHF channels (52–69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition. These stations were not sold to Daystar as part of its purchase of KWBM. The FCC cancelled KNJE-LP's license on August 6, 2010, and deleted the KNJE-LP call sign from its database; KBBL is currently dark with a construction permit to build digital transmitter facilities on UHF channel 24.