KXTU-LP is a low-powered television station affiliated with The CW serving Colorado Springs

Colorado Springs, Colorado

Colorado Springs is a Home Rule Municipality that is the county seat and most populous city of El Paso County, Colorado, United States. Colorado Springs is located in South-Central Colorado, in the southern portion of the state. It is situated on Fountain Creek and is located south of the Colorado...

, Pueblo

Pueblo, Colorado

Pueblo is a Home Rule Municipality that is the county seat and the most populous city of Pueblo County, Colorado, United States. The population was 106,595 in 2010 census, making it the 246th most populous city in the United States....

, and other communities in southern Colorado

Colorado

Colorado is a U.S. state that encompasses much of the Rocky Mountains as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of the Great Plains...

. It is licensed to Pueblo and operates on channel 57. KXTU is a sister station to Fox

Fox Broadcasting Company

Fox Broadcasting Company, commonly referred to as Fox Network or simply Fox , is an American commercial broadcasting television network owned by Fox Entertainment Group, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Launched on October 9, 1986, Fox was the highest-rated broadcast network in the...

 affiliate KXRM-TV

KXRM-TV

KXRM-TV is the Fox-affiliated television station for Central and Southern Colorado that is licensed to Colorado Springs. It broadcasts a high definition digital signal on UHF channel 22 from a transmitter on Cheyenne Mountain...

; both are owned by Barrington Broadcasting

Barrington Broadcasting

Barrington Broadcasting Company, LLC , headquartered in Hoffman Estates, Illinois is an entity wholly focused on broadcast television. The company's assets mainly consist of television stations in middle and small sized markets...

.

Unlike most other low-powered stations, KXTU is available to viewers on DirecTV

DirecTV

DirecTV is an American direct broadcast satellite service provider and broadcaster based in El Segundo, California. Its satellite service, launched on June 17, 1994, transmits digital satellite television and audio to households in the United States, Latin America, and the Anglophone Caribbean. ...

 and Dish Network

Dish Network

Dish Network Corporation is the second largest pay TV provider in the United States, providing direct broadcast satellite service—including satellite television, audio programming, and interactive television services—to 14.337 million commercial and residential customers in the United States. Dish...

, as well as on cable systems

Cable television

Cable television is a system of providing television programs to consumers via radio frequency signals transmitted to televisions through coaxial cables or digital light pulses through fixed optical fibers located on the subscriber's property, much like the over-the-air method used in traditional...

 throughout southern Colorado. This is because under the retransmission consent

Retransmission consent

Retransmission consent is an option granted to US television stations as part of the law that granted such stations the option to elect must-carry rights. Under retransmission consent, a full-power US television station may elect to negotiate with a cable system operator for carriage of its...

 portion of the must-carry

Must-carry

In cable television, governments apply a must-carry regulation stating that locally-licensed television stations must be carried on a cable provider's system.- Canada :...

 rules, Barrington has the right to require cable and satellite providers to carry KXTU as part of the compensation for carrying KXRM.

Since 2008, the station has been available on KXRM's digital subchannel

Digital subchannel

In broadcasting, digital subchannels are a means to transmit more than one independent program at the same time from the same digital radio or digital television station on the same radio frequency channel. This is done by using data compression techniques to reduce the size of each individual...

; its over-the-air signal doesn't make it too far out of Pueblo. KXTU since it was an Low-Power station it didn't have to switch to DT.

On August 30, 2010, KXTU-LP flashed-cut from analog to digital on channel 57.

Programming

The station signed on in 1999 as an affiliate of UPN

UPN

United Paramount Network was a television network that was broadcast in over 200 markets in the United States from 1995 to 2006. UPN was originally owned by Viacom/Paramount and Chris-Craft Industries, the former of which, through the Paramount Television Group, produced most of the network's...

, but when that network left the air on September 17, 2006, it switched to The CW, which was created by the merger of UPN and The WB (which had been available in the market by way of Denver's KWGN-TV

KWGN-TV

KWGN-TV, virtual channel 2 , is a television station in Denver, Colorado, owned by the Tribune Company and affiliated with the CW Television Network...

). Unlike its sister station, KXTU does not air news but during a breaking news event or weather bump it simulcasts KXRM-TV News.

External links

• KXTU "CW 57" website (shared with KXRM)