KWPX-TV


KWPX-TV is a television station licensed to Bellevue, Washington, United States, serving as the Ion Television outlet for the Seattle–Tacoma area. The station is owned and operated by the Ion Media subsidiary of the E. W. Scripps Company. KWPX-TV's offices are located on 304th Avenue Southeast in Preston, and its transmitter is located on West Tiger Mountain near Issaquah.

History

The station signed on the air as KBGE on May 17, 1989. Its original transmitter site was atop Columbia Center; the transmitter was later moved to West Tiger Mountain. The call letters became KWPX-TV on March 9, 1998, after the station was purchased by Paxson Communications, replacing ValueVision with its inTV network until the launch of Pax on August 31, 1998. The station was a part of the early-2000s initiative by NBC to rebroadcast local newscasts a half-hour later on a Pax station; while KING-TV already featured newscasts on sister station KONG, KING-TV also rebroadcast its weeknight 11 p.m. newscasts on KWPX at 11:30 p.m.; these rebroadcasts were dropped in 2003.
Until 2021, the station carried Telemundo on its seventh subchannel, before Scripps' purchase of Ion Media nullified the agreement, in order to carry their subchannel networks. Cox-owned KIRO-TV relaunched the network in the market in the fall of 2022 over subchannel 7.4.

Technical information

Subchannels

The station's signal is multiplexed:
ChannelRes.AspectShort nameProgramming
33.1720p16:9IONIon Television
33.2720p16:9CourtTVCourt TV
33.3480i16:9BounceBounce TV
33.4480i16:9GritDefy
33.5480i16:9IONPlusIon Plus
33.6480i16:9BUSTEDBusted
33.7480i16:9GameShoGame Show Central
33.8480i16:9QVCQVC

Analog-to-digital conversion

KWPX-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 33, on February 17, 2009, to conclude the Digital television transition in [the United States|federally mandated transition from analog to digital television]. The station's digital signal relocated from its pre-transition UHF channel 32 to channel 33.