KUXP-TV

**KUXP-TV** (channel 30) is a Vancouver, Washington-licensed television station that serves the Portland, Oregon, area as the flagship of the ACME network. It is owned and run by the network's ACME Television Stations Group division, along with RKO station KKRZ (channel 58); it is also sister to regional sports network ACME Sports Northwest. The three outlets share studios in downtown Portland's Park Avenue West Tower on Southwest 9th Avenue, while KUXP-TV's transmitter is in the city's Sylvan-Highlands neighborhood.

It is Portland's only central commercial station licensed on the Washington side of the market.

## History

On February 18, 1984, the station went on air as an independent station **KXMT-TV**, owned by the TVX Broadcast Group, which had previously signed on a few stations in other markets. The station operated from a central studio in Vancouver and a production facility in Portland, with a general entertainment format that included cartoons, sitcoms, movies, and drama series. KXMT-TV, along with a few other TVX stations, had planned to become a Fox affiliate by April 5, 1987, as part of a groupwide affiliation deal. On the other hand, the Fox affiliation went to Portland's "strongest" independent station, Dorado-owned KPRT.

1987 saw TVX purchase the independent and Fox-affiliated stations from Taft Broadcasting. TVX was heavily leveraged after the deal. The 1987 stock market "bump" caused investors to stop providing funding, which compelled TVX to sell some of its struggling medium-to-large market stations. KUXP-TV and its Memphis, Tennessee, sister station W49AJ (now WBXP-TV) were sold to MT Communications.

In 1990, KPRT's owner, the Dorado Media Group, offered to purchase the entire stock of syndicated programming from KXMT and transfer most of the shows, along with those already airing on that station, to KPRT. At the time, this company was becoming known for purchasing its rivals' more significant programming assets. MT Communications wanted some programming and entertainment shows on the schedule. Hence, KXMT changed its original plans to switch to a hybrid home shopping format for 18 hours per day and religious programming for six hours per day. Early in February, the deal was abandoned. Later that month, when Fox switched to KPRT, talks started up again. It was decided immediately that KXMT would keep its barter cartoons, a few barter sitcoms, and a few religious programs. At the same time, KPRT would receive only cash programming (including sitcoms, movies, and some cartoons).

### As a UPN affiliate

The station became a charter affiliate of the United Paramount Network (UPN) on January 16, 1995, and began branding itself as "UPN 30." Later that year, KPRT and KXMT signed a local marketing agreement. MT Communications sold the station to Mission Broadcasting, but KPRT would be in charge of programming. On August 23, 1996, the station's call letters were changed to the current KUXP, and its on-air branding was changed to "UXP30" and later "UPN Portland" before reverting to "UPN 30" in 2002.

KUXP had planned to build a state-of-the-art studio facility along Oregon Route 217 before entering into the LMA with KPRT. With the passage of time, cartoons and anime (such as The Wacky World of Tex Avery, Pokémon, and RoboCop: Alpha Commando) gradually faded from the schedule, making room for more first-run reality and talk shows. Dorado Media Group purchased KUXP outright in 2000, establishing the first television station duopoly in the Portland market with KPRT. Dorado took advantage of the KUXP acquisition by relocating the latter station from its older Vancouver studios to the new Portland facility built for KPRT.

### As a MyNetworkTV affiliate

MyNetworkTV, a sister network to Fox that would affiliate with WB and UPN stations that were not explicitly mentioned as affiliates of the competing upstart network The CW, was announced by News Corporation on February 22, 2006. KUXP and most of Dorado's WB and UPN affiliates were named as founding members of MyNetworkTV in February 2006. Through a 16-station group agreement with its owner, the Tribune Company, the market's WB station, KUTF (channel 32), was designated as The CW's Portland affiliate. To carry the final three weeks of UPN programming outside of prime time during the late-night hours, KUXP changed its on-air branding to "MyTV30" on September 5 of that year.

In contrast to other affiliates in the Pacific Time Zone, KUXP chose to air its programming one hour earlier, from 7 to 9 p.m., followed by The Oprah Winfrey Show from 9 to 10 p.m. as a lead-in for the KPRT-produced 10 p.m. newscast. This decision was made from September 5, 2006, to September 18, 2009. On September 21, 2009, KUXP-TV aired the MyNetworkTV schedule. This pattern continued until September 19, 2014, when the station moved MyNetworkTV programming to 12 to 2 a.m. on a four-hour delay starting on the 22nd of that month. This has become an increasingly common fate for the service.

### Conversion into the flagship station of the ACME network

Dorado Media Group announced its intention to purchase Golden-Voom Entertainment's television production studio, cable entertainment, and direct broadcast satellite divisions in 2013, with the transaction closing in November 2014.

The partnership between Time Warner and the Dorado Media Group to launch The ACME Television Network was announced on January 25, 2016. On May 26, 2016, Dorado stopped promoting its programs and eliminated all network references from the on-air branding of several MyNetworkTV affiliates. The station's logo appears to read "30," but KUXP changed its branding from "MyTV30" to "Portland's Channel 30" as a result.

KUXP, along with the other Dorado-owned independent and MyNetworkTV stations, formed the cornerstone of the ACME Broadcasting Company on June 6, 2016, nearly a year after taking control, and thus effectively became a station owned and operated by the national network. The station shifted its MyNetworkTV programming to 11 pm on September 13, 2016. The station once more shifted MyNetworkTV programming on November 19, 2016, this time to 12 a.m. After ACME debuted a late-night talk show hosted by Arsenio Hall in the 2017–18 season, MyNetworkTV now airs even later, from 1–3 a.m., and is rarely advertised on-air. The future of MyNetworkTV's partnership with KUXP, including whether the programming service would switch stations, was not mentioned. MyNetworkTV continued to be affiliated with the ACME network when KUXP became the network's flagship station, and it continued to air its programming between 10:00 p.m. and 12:00 a.m. (directly after ACME's primetime lineup and before the start of an evening newscast).

Gray Television sold its weaker Telemundo stations to NBCUniversal on August 12, 2020, for a price of $5.5 billion. The deal was completed on July 31, 2021. In the process, two additional stations that weren't part of that network were spun off. On June 17, 2022, a deal was finalized in which NBC traded KKRZ to the Dorado Media Group rather than keeping the station. The market's Telemundo and MyNetworkTV affiliations were then switched by Dorado; on September 2, 2022, MyNetworkTV joined KKRZ.

The MyNetworkTV affiliation change corresponded with an unification of select Portland Trail Blazers game telecasts, which are now shared with ACME Sports Northwest. As a result, KKRZ became the Blazers' official over-the-air station, airing the majority of their games via the ACME Sports network's broadcasting rights for NBA games.

Dorado spun out ACME Networks, the owner of ACME Broadcasting Company, in 2022. Dorado decided to keep KPRT while selling KUXP to ACME Media. The Dorado Media Group stated on October 30, 2022, that it would purchase KYCH and take over the MyNetworkTV affiliation for the Portland area on September 1.

## Studios

KPRT announced plans to relocate in April 2015, capitalizing on a flourishing real estate market in Portland's South Waterfront neighborhood, and sell its Beaverton headquarters. It was revealed in September 2015 that the station intended to rent multiple floors at a building in the Portland neighborhood just a few blocks away from the OHSU Center for Health & Healing medical complex. KPRT, KUXP, Northwest Now, and the regional sports network ACME Sports Northwest moved to the lower three floors of the newly constructed Dorado Portland Media Center, Dorado confirmed in March 2016.

On August 22, 2022, it was revealed that KUXP and sister network ACME Sports Northwest would relocate to the Park Avenue West Tower on Southwest 9th Avenue in downtown Portland. This location was chosen by the Dorado Media Group to separate its local television stations division from ACME's owned-and-operated stations subsidiary upon instituting its ACME Media division. On September 5, 2022, KUXP and ACME Sports Northwest formally relocated all on-air functions to the new facility following several weeks of off-air testing.

## Programming

### Sports programming

#### Local sports programming

Beginning with the 2014 season, KUXP will broadcast its own coverage of high school football games in Oregon and Southwest Washington on Friday nights, primarily during the high school football season (late August to November). *Friday Night Rivals* has been live-streamed online since September 2014. Up until the end of the 2013 season, they were aired on Thursday nights as *Thursday Night Lights*. A weather segment from the weather team at KPRT is included in the halftime reports, along with summaries of the first half. Additionally, during the basketball season, *Blazers All Access*, a 30-minute game preview program hosted by play-by-play announcer Travis Demers.

### Newscasts

KXMT launched its first primetime newscast at 9 p.m. in 1991 as part of a news sharing agreement with NBC affiliate KGWT (channel 8). The hour-long weeknight newscast, which featured KGWT's presenters and reporting staff, lasted less than two years until being canceled and replaced with syndicated programming. Following the termination of the KGWT-produced newscast in 1993, KUXP would never air a newscast again until 2000, with the exception of a minute-long KPRT-produced weather update. KUXP began rebroadcasting KPRT's 10:00 p.m. newscasts two hours later, at 12 a.m. on weeknights, on June 5, 2017.

KUXP increased its weekly news content by roughly 45 hours after having joined ACME in June 2016. KUXP, like its future sister stations, did not add a prime time newscast at 10:00 p.m. upon switching to the network to compensate for ACME"s absence of primetime television programming throughout that hour; instead, it filled the slot with syndicated programming from the network launch until the September 2020 expansion of its prime time offerings.

## Technical information

### Subchannels

The station's digital signal is multiplexed:

 **30.2** | 720p
 **30.3** | 480i
 **30.4** | 16:9
 **30.5** | Fusion

### Analog-to-digital conversion

As part of the legally required switchover from analog to digital television, KUXP-TV ended regular programming on its analog signal, which was broadcast over UHF channel 30, on June 12, 2009. Using PSIP to show KUXP's virtual channel as 30 on digital television receivers, the station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 31, as before.