KMOV News 4 St. Louis online - Television live

KMOV News 4 St. Louis Live Stream

KMOV - First Alert 4 - is St. Louis's CBS affiliate: a station launched by a radio station, owned by a network, renamed by a media conglomerate and rebranded by its current owner, Gray Media. Broadcasting from Progress Parkway in suburban Maryland Heights on channel 4 and its digital siblings - including the market's ABC outlet since 2026 - it pairs CBS's national programming with a newsroom that has been breaking St. Louis stories since 1954, and its newscasts also stream live online.

Few stations have worn as many identities: KWK-TV, KMOX-TV, KMOV, First Alert 4 - four names for one transmitter, each one a chapter of American broadcasting history.

First Alert 4

First Alert 4 is the Gray-era brand, with the weather-first identity the name implies - a live stream and radar operation for a market that watches the sky over the Mississippi and the plains to its west. The newsroom's innovations go back half a century: in 1973 the station became the first in the world to move to entirely electronic news gathering, abandoning film for videotape, and in 1975 it became the first local station in St. Louis to feature a Black weeknight anchor, Julius Hunter. Under the Belo Corporation, KMOV became one of the highest-rated CBS affiliates for news in a major market and won a Peabody Award in 2007 for its series on the schools of East St. Louis - journalism the station still measures itself against.

From KWK-TV to KMOX to KMOV

Channel 4 was built by radio station KWK and signed on 8 July 1954 as KWK-TV, after six years of legal battles and the federal construction freeze. CBS wanted its own St. Louis outlet, won a permit for channel 11 in 1957 - and then sped up its entry by simply buying channel 4 instead, renaming it KMOX-TV on 16 March 1958 after its radio sister KMOX. As one of the network's five owned-and-operated stations, KMOX-TV led the market's news in its early years, pioneered electronic newsgathering, and moved to the Gateway Tower downtown in 1968. In 1986, fending off a hostile takeover from Ted Turner, CBS sold the station to Viacom - which renamed it KMOV, slimmed it down, and in 1989 pioneered hourly news updates that spread across the country. Paramount absorbed Viacom in 1994, traded the station to Belo in 1997, and after the Meredith years, Gray Media acquired KMOV in 2021, moved it to Maryland Heights, and gave it the First Alert 4 name.

Two Networks, One Station

On 1 September 2026, a KMOV subchannel replaced KDNL-TV as the St. Louis market's ABC affiliate, making channel 4 one of the few stations carrying two of the Big Four networks. The lineup now runs CBS and ABC across channels 4 and 32, with sports-oriented sister KDTL-LD carrying Matrix Midwest, Gray's regional channel. The studios in Maryland Heights and the Lemay transmitter anchor the operation - and the live stream carries the whole thing, from First Alert weather to the network schedules, to St. Louisans wherever they watch.

KMOV News 4 St. Louis Watch Live Streaming now online