KDEN
KDEN-TV (channel 25), branded Telemundo Denver, is a Spanish-language television station licensed to Longmont, Colorado, in the United States, serving as the Denver area's outlet for the Telemundo network. It is owned and operated by NBCUniversal's Telemundo Station Group. The station maintains studios at the Comcast Media Center on East Dry Creek Road in Centennial, and its transmitter is located in rural southwestern Weld County, east of Frederick. Its website is telemundodenver.com. KDEN's history is comparatively short but instructive: launched in 1997 as a locally owned independent station, it was bought by NBCUniversal in 2006 specifically to give Telemundo a full-power, owned-and-operated presence in Denver, and it has built its local news operation in stages ever since, from brief news cut-ins to a full in-house newsroom.
Licensing, Market and Branding
KDEN is licensed to Longmont, a city in Boulder and Weld counties north of Denver, but it serves the entire Denver metropolitan area, one of the largest television markets in the Mountain West. Its call sign reflects that purpose: KDEN takes its letters from Denver, and DEN is also the airport code for Denver International Airport. Although the station's community of license is Longmont, its studios are in Centennial, in the southern Denver suburbs, and its identity on air is simply Telemundo Denver — or, in more recent branding for its newscasts, Noticias Telemundo Colorado, reflecting coverage that reaches Spanish-speaking viewers across Colorado rather than a single city. As a network owned-and-operated station, KDEN is part of the Telemundo Station Group alongside Telemundo outlets in larger markets such as Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth and Chicago.
Launch as an Independent Station, 1997
KDEN first signed on the air on March 31, 1997. It was founded by locally owned Longmont Broadcasting and originally operated as an independent station, without a network affiliation. In the late 1990s, Denver was served by a full complement of English-language network affiliates and established independents, and a new UHF independent licensed to Longmont faced the familiar challenge of building an audience with syndicated and local programming. The station continued in that form for nearly nine years. Its significance in that period lies less in its programming than in its existence as a full-power signal covering the Denver market — an asset that would make it attractive when a national network came looking for a Denver outlet it could own outright.
Telemundo Before KDEN: The Low-Power Years
Before 2006, Denver viewers who wanted Telemundo had to rely on low-power television. Telemundo programming in the market was seen on KMAS-LP (channel 63) and KSBS-LP (channel 47), which served as repeaters of KMAS-TV (channel 24) in Steamboat Springs, a full-power station in the mountains of northwestern Colorado. Low-power repeaters could deliver the network to parts of the metropolitan area, but they lacked the coverage, cable and satellite carriage and promotional weight of a full-power station, and they gave the network no substantial local presence in Denver itself. That arrangement explains why NBCUniversal, which had acquired Telemundo nationally in 2002, eventually sought a full-power Denver station of its own — and why KDEN, an available full-power independent, fitted its plans.
Purchase by NBCUniversal and the Telemundo Launch, 2006
On January 19, 2006, Longmont Broadcasting sold KDEN to NBC Universal. Trade coverage at the time put the price at $42 million. The purchase made KDEN the second television station in the Denver market to have been an owned-and-operated station under NBC ownership, after KCNC-TV (channel 4), which NBC had owned from 1986 to 1995 before it became a CBS owned-and-operated station. KDEN was described as the company's 17th Spanish-language television station and the third network owned-and-operated station in the Denver market overall. On March 6, 2006, channel 25 became the market's Telemundo owned-and-operated station, replacing the low-power repeater arrangement with a full-power network service.
The transition tidied up the old Telemundo structure in Colorado. After the purchase, NBC Universal donated the KMAS-TV licence and transmitter facility in Steamboat Springs to Rocky Mountain PBS, which changed its call letters to KRMZ. KSBS-LP was sold to Denver Digital Television. NBC retained KMAS-LP, which moved to channel 33 in 2008, was converted to the digital station KMAS-LD in 2012, and remained a repeater of KDEN-TV until its licence was cancelled on December 6, 2019. In effect, the Denver Telemundo operation was consolidated onto KDEN's full-power signal, with the former mountain flagship passing to public broadcasting.
Early News Efforts and Budget Cuts
Local news has been the measure of KDEN's development as a Telemundo station, and its first attempt was modest. Upon affiliating with Telemundo in 2006, KDEN aired locally produced news cut-ins during the network's national evening newscasts, Noticiero Telemundo and Noticiero Telemundo Internacional. The inserts were discontinued late that same year as a result of budget cutbacks imposed by NBC Universal. For several years afterwards, KDEN offered Denver's Spanish-speaking viewers the Telemundo network schedule without a regular local newscast of its own — a gap in a market where its Spanish-language competitor had an established local news presence. Rebuilding that local service became the station's main project of the following decade.
The KUSA News Share Agreement, 2011 to 2015
KDEN returned to local news through partnership. On July 29, 2011, the station announced a news share agreement with KUSA (channel 9), Denver's NBC affiliate, to produce Spanish-language newscasts for KDEN. The half-hour programmes aired at 5:30 and 10 p.m. on weeknights under the combined branding Noticiero Telemundo Denver and 9News en Español, and they debuted on October 3, 2011. The newscasts used a separate on-air staff exclusive to the KDEN broadcasts and were produced from a secondary set at KUSA's studio facility on East Speer Boulevard in Denver. They were broadcast in high definition from their launch. The arrangement gave KDEN the resources and infrastructure of the market's leading English-language newsroom while keeping a distinct Spanish-language presentation and staff for its own audience.
The service expanded within that structure: on October 20, 2014, KDEN added a 4:30 p.m. newscast and moved its 5:30 p.m. programme to 5 p.m., lengthening its early-evening news presence. The partnership model was, however, a transitional one, and Telemundo's national strategy in this period was moving toward owned stations producing their own newscasts with their own staffs.
An In-House Newsroom in Centennial
In July 2015, KDEN began producing its own newscasts from the Comcast Media Center in Centennial, where its studios are now located, while retaining a content partnership with KUSA. The change transformed the scale of the operation: the KDEN news staff grew from four people before the move to 18 in 2016. Denver reporting in this period described Telemundo quietly gaining ground on its Spanish-language rival in the market, as the investment in a dedicated newsroom gave channel 25 a fuller local identity. KDEN was also part of group-wide Telemundo news expansions in the mid-2010s, in which the station group added new early-evening newscasts across many of its markets and hired additional newsroom staff to support them.
In its more recent form, the station's news service is branded Noticias Telemundo Colorado and airs on weekday afternoons and evenings, with editions at 4, 4:30 and 5 p.m. and a late newscast at 10 p.m.; the station does not produce local newscasts on Saturdays or Sundays, and it has been counted among the Telemundo owned-and-operated stations that do not produce a midday newscast. Its reporting covers the issues that structure life for Spanish-speaking Coloradans, including local government, crime and immigration, and its journalists have received recognition in the state, including from the Colorado Broadcasters Association for reporting on an educational initiative serving migrant children in Denver. The trajectory from short cut-ins in 2006 to a staffed, multi-edition newsroom in Centennial is the central story of KDEN's Telemundo era.
Programming and Audience
Outside its local newscasts, KDEN carries the Telemundo network schedule: Spanish-language drama series, news programmes produced by the network, sports coverage including major international football tournaments, entertainment formats and specials. As an owned-and-operated station, it follows the network's national programming strategy closely, inserting its local news and local advertising into the schedule. The station serves a Colorado Hispanic audience that earlier had to depend on low-power signals for Spanish-language network television; the combination of a full-power signal, network ownership and, eventually, a dedicated local newsroom gave that audience a service comparable in structure to the English-language network stations in the same market. Its online presence under the Telemundo Denver name extends its news and programming promotion beyond the broadcast signal.
Technical Information and Subchannels
KDEN-TV shut down its analogue signal on UHF channel 25 on June 12, 2009, the national date on which full-power stations in the United States completed the transition from analogue to digital broadcasting. Its digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 29, with receivers displaying virtual channel 25. The station's licensed effective radiated power is 800 kW, with a height above average terrain of 379.1 metres, from its transmitter in rural southwestern Weld County east of Frederick — a site north of Denver suited to covering the metropolitan area from Longmont's side of the market. Its FCC facility ID is 38375.
The digital signal is multiplexed into several subchannels. The main channel, 25.1, carries Telemundo in high definition. The remaining subchannels carry TeleXitos, Cozi TV, NBC True CRMZ, Oxygen and Nosey, giving over-the-air viewers in the Denver area a package of Spanish-language and English-language entertainment and lifestyle services in addition to the main network feed. For a station that began in 1997 as a small, locally owned independent, KDEN's present form — a network owned-and-operated outlet with its own Colorado newsroom and a six-stream digital multiplex — reflects how thoroughly Spanish-language television in Denver was rebuilt around full-power network ownership after 2006.
