KTDO
KTDO (channel 48) is a television station licensed to Las Cruces, New Mexico, in the United States, broadcasting the Spanish-language Telemundo network to the El Paso, Texas, area. It is owned and operated by NBCUniversal's Telemundo Station Group. The station maintains studios on Pellicano Drive in El Paso, and its transmitter is located atop the Franklin Mountains on the El Paso city limits. Branded on air as Telemundo 48, with newscasts under the Noticiero Telemundo 48 name, the station has a history that spans two distinct eras: it began in 1984 as an English-language independent station for Las Cruces, struggled through receivership, silence and bankruptcy, and was reinvented from 1998 onward as the Telemundo outlet for a large, predominantly Hispanic border market.
Licensing, Market and Ownership
Although licensed to Las Cruces in Doña Ana County, New Mexico, KTDO is in practice an El Paso station. El Paso, across the state line in Texas and adjacent to Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, is the centre of the television market the station serves, and KTDO's studios and transmitter are both in El Paso. That cross-border, bilingual market shapes everything about the station: its present Spanish-language format, its news focus, and its position as one of two major Spanish-language outlets in the market alongside the Univision affiliate, KINT-TV (channel 26). KTDO is held by NBC Telemundo License LLC as part of the Telemundo Station Group, the NBCUniversal division that owns Telemundo stations across the United States. Its website is telemundo48elpaso.com, reflecting the El Paso identity of a station whose city of license is in another state.
The KASK-TV Years, 1984 to 1987
Channel 48 in Las Cruces was contested from the start. In 1983, the Federal Communications Commission designated three competing applications for a new Las Cruces station for comparative hearing. The applicants included KASK Inc., owner of Las Cruces radio station KASK (103.1 FM), and the parties settled in October 1983 with the KASK application granted. The television station was built on the ninth floor of the First National Bank Tower in Las Cruces and began broadcasting on November 18, 1984, as KASK-TV. It was the city's first commercial television outlet and operated as an English-language independent station, with a schedule that included daily local news: a 7 p.m. news brief and a full 10 p.m. newscast concentrating on southern New Mexico.
The station's early life was difficult. Difficulties surrounding its co-ownership with KASK radio delayed its full licence, and financially it was losing money — by April 1986 its owners said it was losing $2,500 a month, and it was put up for sale. A sale to a Las Cruces business group was announced that September, and the station was placed in receivership to avoid a bankruptcy proceeding in which the bank was the principal creditor. The receiver agreed to sell to a Houston businessman in 1987. Before that transaction closed, KASK-TV left the air on October 2, 1987, intending to move its transmitter and rebuild at higher power. Approval had been given for a new tower site near Anthony, New Mexico, and an increase in power from 74,000 watts to the maximum of five million watts. By late 1988, however, the buyer had abandoned the attempt to return the station to the air and was looking for another purchaser.
Return as KZIA and a Second Failure
Channel 48 went back into receivership, and in October 1989 the receiver filed to sell it to Southwestern Broadcasting Company, owned by Carol and Robert Muñoz. The call sign was changed to KZIA, after the Zia symbol that is a state symbol of New Mexico. Muñoz, a former general manager of an El Paso station, aimed to provide local news coverage of Las Cruces and hoped to carry New Mexico State University Aggies athletics. The station returned to the air on June 13, 1990, with a 6:30 p.m. newscast called Newswatch and a general entertainment schedule of comedies, dramas and movies outside local programming. It also initially replayed another station's early newscast in the late evening and, from March 1991, carried live Albuquerque newscasts by microwave link in an arrangement described as the first of its kind.
Carriage on the El Paso cable system in 1991 widened KZIA's potential audience, but the economics remained fragile. The local newscast was dropped in June 1991 for lack of advertiser support, and sporting events the station carried lost money. In August 1992, Muñoz placed the station in bankruptcy reorganisation to keep it on the air, blaming an economic downturn and the effect of the Gulf War on advertising, after the FCC dismissed a proposed sale to a Seattle company. In March 1993, Lee Enterprises, owner of Albuquerque station KRQE, agreed to acquire KZIA for $440,000, less than half the price of the failed 1992 bid. Under Lee, the station carried New Mexico Lobos football, a local sports programme and a new translator on channel 46 for parts of Las Cruces that had received a poor signal.
UPN Affiliation and the Move to El Paso
Under Lee Enterprises, channel 48 took a step toward a network identity when it became a charter affiliate of the United Paramount Network, UPN, at the network's launch in January 1995, branding itself as Z48. Later that year, after a dispute with the city of Las Cruces over microwave dishes that the station needed for line of sight to its transmitter, KZIA relocated its studios from Las Cruces to east El Paso. The move was an early sign of the station's centre of gravity shifting from its city of license toward the larger El Paso market, a shift that would define its future. Through the mid-1990s, though, it remained an English-language station competing as a minor outlet in a top-100 general market.
Conversion to Telemundo in 1998
The decisive change came at the end of 1997, when Lee Enterprises decided to convert channel 48 from an English-language to a Spanish-language outlet. The call sign was changed to KMAZ in November 1997, and on January 15, 1998, the station affiliated with Telemundo. Management's reasoning was strategic: rather than remain the fifth or sixth outlet in a general market, the station could grow as the second Spanish-language station, after Univision affiliate KINT-TV, in a major Hispanic market. KMAZ replaced a Ciudad Juárez station as the area's Telemundo affiliate, while UPN programming in El Paso moved elsewhere. The conversion set the course the station has followed ever since.
Lee put its broadcasting properties up for sale in 2000 as it refocused on publishing. In January 2001, KMAZ was sold to Council Tree Hispanic Broadcasters of Longmont, Colorado, which had acquired a controlling stake in Telemundo the previous year, briefly making channel 48 a network owned-and-operated station. The call sign changed to KTYO in September 2001. Council Tree sold its Telemundo stake to NBC in October 2001 but retained channel 48 for three more years, making improvements to its signal during that period.
The ZGS Era and the KTDO Name
In 2004, the station was sold to ZGS Broadcast Holdings for $11.8 million, and on October 1, 2004, its call sign became KTDO, a name referencing Telemundo itself. Under ZGS, a specialist owner of Spanish-language stations, KTDO remained the market's Telemundo affiliate but for several years relied on network programming without a full local news operation of its own in Spanish. That changed on November 16, 2010, when KTDO debuted local newscasts at 5 and 10 p.m. on weeknights, its first Spanish-language local news department, putting it into direct news competition with KINT-TV for the first time. The launch of local news marked KTDO's maturation from a network pass-through into a full local broadcaster for El Paso's Spanish-speaking audience.
Telemundo Owned-and-Operated Status
On December 4, 2017, NBCUniversal's Telemundo Station Group announced it would purchase the television stations of ZGS, including KTDO. The sale was completed on February 1, 2018, and KTDO became a Telemundo owned-and-operated station for the second time in its history, now on a permanent footing within NBCUniversal. Investment followed: in June 2018, the station launched additional newscasts at 4 and 4:30 p.m., expanding its early-evening news block. In 2023, NBC moved the station into a new building in El Paso, the Pellicano Drive facility from which it now operates. As an owned-and-operated station, KTDO shares the Telemundo Station Group's national resources, branding and news expansion strategy while retaining its local focus on El Paso and Las Cruces.
News and Programming Today
KTDO's programming is built around the Telemundo network schedule, which supplies Spanish-language entertainment, news, sports and special events programming throughout the day, together with the station's own local newscasts under the Noticiero Telemundo 48 banner. The local news operation that began in 2010 and expanded in 2018 gives the station a presence in the early-evening and late-evening periods that are central to Spanish-language television viewing in the market. Its coverage area encompasses El Paso, Las Cruces and the surrounding border region, a community bound together by language, family and commerce across the Rio Grande, and the station's news reflects that binational reality in its choice of stories and its audience.
Technical Information and Subchannels
KTDO's transmitter is located in the Franklin Mountains at the El Paso city limits, the site used by the market's United States-based stations. The station shut down its analogue signal on UHF channel 48 on June 12, 2009, the national digital transition date. Its digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 47, using virtual channel 48, and in 2020 the station relocated its digital signal from channel 47 to channel 26 as a result of the 2016 United States wireless spectrum auction. Its licensed effective radiated power is 132 kW, with a height above average terrain of 553 metres.
The digital signal is multiplexed. The main subchannel, 48.1, carries Telemundo in high definition. Further subchannels carry TeleXitos, NBC True CRMZ and Cozi TV, along with Oxygen, and the station also hosts subchannels on behalf of another El Paso station. The station's FCC facility ID is 36916. From its beginnings as a struggling independent in a bank tower in Las Cruces, channel 48 has become a network-owned fixture of Spanish-language broadcasting on the border — a transformation driven, at every stage, by the demographics and geography of the El Paso–Las Cruces market it serves.
