The station first signed on the air on September 10, 1987 as KUBD. Originally operating as an independent station, the station aired financial news programming from the Financial News Network during the daytime hours and ran a general entertainment schedule at night. In 1989, KUBD became the original Denver area affiliate of the Spanish-language network Telemundo. FNN ceased operations two years later, when it was absorbed by CNBC. In 1995, KUBD was sold by its original ownership group to Christian Network, Inc., a non-profit organization co-founded by Bud Paxson, for $6.5 million. The CNI stations, including KUBD, were sold to Paxson Communications in 1996. The station changed its call letters to KPXC-TV on February 2, 1998; KPXC became a charter owned-and-operated station of Paxson's new family-oriented broadcast network Pax TV when the network launched on August 31, 1998. In 2001, KPXC obtained the localtelevision rights to carry select NHL games featuring the Colorado Avalanche; the deal to broadcast the games ended in 2003. On December 15, 2014, Ion reached a deal to donate KPXC-TV's low-power repeater in Fort Collins, KPXH-LD, to Word of God Fellowship, parent company of the Daystar network.
Digital television
Analog-to-digital conversion
KPXC-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHFchannel 59, on June 12, 2009, the official date in which full-power television stations in the United Statestransitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 43. Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 59, which was among the high band UHF channels that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition.
Newscasts
In September 2001, as part of its joint sales agreement with that station, KPXC-TV began airing tape delayed rebroadcasts of Gannett's NBC affiliate KUSA-TV 's 6:00 and 10:00 p.m. newscasts each Monday through Friday evening at 6:30 and 10:30 p.m.. The news rebroadcasts ended on June 30, 2005, when the network's other news share agreements with major network affiliates throughout the United States were terminated upon the network's rebranding as i: Independent Television, as a result of the network's financial troubles.