Fayetteville’s first television station, KGTO, had studios in the SWEPCO Building at northwest corner of Center Street and Church Avenue.
Using Channel 36, it began broadcasting from a tower on Robinson Mountain on Feb. 8, 1969.
The station was owned by Noark Broadcasting, a partnership between Paul Milam Sr., Paul Milam Jr., E.J. Ball, Tom Cowan and Weldon Stamps, although Stamps withdrew from the partnership by July.
At the beginning, the station was an NBC affiliate, but it wasn’t allowed a network feed, instead having to pay other NBC carriers such as KARK in Little Rock for network programming.
On Jan. 22, 1972, the station switched to CBS, and then Noark sold the station to George Hernreich, owner of the Fort Smith station.
Hernreich took KGTO off the air on Dec. 23, 1973, while trying to work out issues with the Federal Communications Commission and on-ground problems with thefts of equipment at the transmission tower on Robinson Mountain.
The station resumed broadcast in 1977, but its call letters were changed to KTVP at that point and its broadcast channel became 29.