KPXD-TV

KPXD-TV, virtual channel 68 (UHF channel 42), is a Ion Television owned-and-operated television station serving the Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex that is licensed to Arlington, Texas. The station is owned by Ion Media Networks. KPXD maintains offices located on Six Flags Drive in Arlington, and its transmitter is located south of Belt Line Road in Cedar Hill.

History

The station first signed on the air on December 21, 1996 as KINZ-TV (in reference to is original affiliation with the Infomail TV Network (InTV), the predecessor-of-sorts of Ion Television), carrying infomercials for much of its schedule and programming from religious broadcaster The Worship Network during the overnight hours. The station was to have originally given the call letters KAQV in its construction permit to operate the station, which were changed prior to its sign-on. In early 1998, Paxson Communications (the forerunner to Ion Media Networks) bought the station, and changed its call letters to KPXD-TV on January 13; the station became a charter owned-and-operated station of Paxson's new family-oriented broadcast network Pax TV (now Ion Television) when the network launched on August 31, 1998.

KPXD "Pax 68" logo, used from 1998 to 2005.

As part of a wide-ranging deal that gave NBC partial ownership of Pax, the former network's owned-and-operated stations as well as many of its affiliates provided sales and marketing assistance for Pax TV stations in several markets, with KPXD entering into a joint sales agreement with KXAS-TV (channel 5; which NBC had owned 76% interest in at the time, it is now owned by the network outright).

In 2003, Pax TV decided to scale back its programming due to financial losses, resulting in much of the afternoon timeslots on its stations' schedules being filled with infomercials. After Pax was rebranded as i: Independent Television on June 30, 2005, Worship Network programming moved to one of KPXD's digital subchannels (originally its third subchannel, then to its fourth subchannel after Ion Life and Qubo launched, before Worship was dropped on January 31, 2010). Formed in 2006, ION Media Networks, Inc. is a privately owned, independent television company.

Digital television

KPXD-TV's over-the-air digital channel is multiplexed:^[1]

Digital channels

Analog-to-digital conversion

KPXD-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 68, on June 12, 2009, as part of the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television.^[2] The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 42, using PSIP to display KPXD-TV's virtual channel as 68 on digital television receivers, which was among the high band UHF channels (52-69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition.

Newscasts

In September 2001, as part of the JSA with that station, KPXD began airing tape delayed rebroadcasts of NBC station KXAS-TV's 6:00 and 10:00 p.m. newscasts each Monday through Friday evening at 6:30 and 10:30 p.m. (the latter beginning shortly before that program's live broadcast ended on KXAS). The news rebroadcasts ended in 2003, two years before most of the network's other news share agreements with Pax TV stations were terminated upon the network's rebranding as i: Independent Television, as a result of the network's financial troubles.

References

External links

• www.iontelevision.com - Ion Television official website
• Query the FCC's TV station database for KPXD
• BIAfn's Media Web Database -- Information on KPXD-TV
• DFW Radio/TV History