KLNI-TV was a television station on channel 15 licensed to Lafayette and New Iberia, Louisiana, United States. It broadcast from September 16, 1968, to February 21, 1975, and throughout its existence served as the NBC affiliate for the Lafayette area; the station closed due to financial difficulties. KLNI-TV broadcast from studios on the Evangeline Thruway in Broussard, halfway between the two towns, and a transmitter near Youngsville.
History
The Federal Communications Commission granted Southwest Louisiana Communications, Inc., a construction permit for a new commercial television station on channel 15 in September 1967. The permit was awarded on a 4–2 FCC vote; two commissioners dissented because of minimum mileage spacing concerns to a channel 14 allocation at Morgan City. Construction proceeded quickly, and KLNI-TV went on air a year later, on September 16, 1968. A week later, Leif Erickson was the featured guest at the station's open house. KLNI-TV operated from the first color-designed television studios in the state of Louisiana, which featured a viewing room to allow the public to watch program production and an outdoor patio for shows and commercials. Channel 15 brought full NBC network service to Lafayette for the first time; previously, no NBC station put a Grade A signal into Lafayette. KLNI-TV also aired Sesame Street beginning in 1970, as Lafayette was not served by a public television station at the time. However, channel 15 faced an uphill climb as a UHF outlet in a television market that had two VHF stations. In 1970, the station sued the American Research Bureauratings agency, seeking $625,000 in damages for having been wrongfully dropped from the November 1969 ARB survey; the KLNI-TV claimed the omission caused a loss of advertising income and damaged its reputation. In 1970, Charles A. Castille, former president of a chain of pharmacies in the Lafayette area, bought stock in Southwestern Louisiana Communications; he was also elected president of the board. In November 1974, Castille was elected to the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education; his opponent in that election believed a recall petition could be made against him because, among other allegations, he believed Castille was about to try and sell KLNI-TV to the state to reduce his debt. At that time, KLNI-TV was described as "financially troubled". A month later, on February 21, channel 15 went dark: while it cited technical issues in the immediate aftermath of going silent, it noted "severe financial troubles" as the reason for its cessation of operations in an FCC filing. The three remaining board members, not including Castille, then made an attempt to sell the facility to the state-owned Louisiana Educational Television Authority; the state network opted not to purchase the facility, citing technical limitations and noting it may have taken as long as two years to begin operating. Channel 15 would not be used again in Lafayette until a new group activated it as KADN-TV, which began telecasting March 1, 1980. It would be more than 40 years before an NBC affiliate was launched again in the Lafayette market, when KLAF-LD affiliated with NBC on July 1, 2015.
