KZJL
KZJL is a Spanish-language television station in Houston, Texas, broadcasting on virtual channel 61 as the Houston station of the Estrella TV network. It is owned by MediaCo, through the Estrella operation the company absorbed in 2025, and is a sister station to a group of Spanish-language radio stations in the Houston and southeast Texas area. KZJL's studios are on Bering Drive on Houston's southwest side, and its transmitter is near Missouri City in unincorporated northeastern Fort Bend County, part of the antenna farm that serves the Houston market. The station's history divides into three periods: a home shopping outlet from 1995 to 2001, a Spanish-language independent under Liberman Broadcasting from 2001 to 2009, and an Estrella TV owned-and-operated station from the network's launch in 2009 onward.
Overview and Market Position
Houston is one of the largest Spanish-language television markets in the United States, with long-established Univision and Telemundo stations. KZJL occupies the challenger position in that market as the local home of Estrella TV, the broadcast network built by Liberman Broadcasting, later Estrella Media, from its chain of Spanish-language radio and television stations. Estrella TV was designed as a national network programmed in the United States for U.S. Hispanic audiences, with entertainment, variety and news produced for that audience rather than imported wholesale, and KZJL has been one of its owned-and-operated stations since the day the network launched.
As an owned-and-operated station, KZJL's main schedule is the network feed, presented under the Estrella TV Houston identity, with local news having been offered in specific periods of the station's history. Its digital multiplex also carries the Estrella News service on a subchannel, giving the Houston operation a continuous Spanish-language news presence even outside the hours of locally originated programming.
Launch as a Home Shopping Station
KZJL first signed on the air on June 3, 1995, as an affiliate of the Shop at Home network, the television shopping service that filled the schedules of many new UHF stations in the 1990s. Channel 61 was a late addition to the Houston dial, a high UHF allocation in a market whose principal stations occupied lower numbers, and home shopping provided a turnkey programme service for a station without the resources or the ambition to build a local entertainment schedule. The station operated in that form for six years, through the second half of the 1990s, as an English-language shopping outlet with no significant local production.
The station's call letters, KZJL, date from this original period. No published account assigns the letters a specific meaning, and they were retained unchanged through the station's subsequent changes of ownership, language and network, which is typical of call signs acquired before a station's defining identity was established.
Purchase by Liberman and the Spanish-Language Independent Years
In 2001, KZJL was purchased by Liberman Broadcasting, the company founded by Mexican-born media executive José Liberman and his son Lenard. Liberman was a major owner of Spanish-language radio stations in large Hispanic markets and had entered television in 1998 by purchasing KRCA, channel 62 in Los Angeles, which it converted first to a mixed Spanish and Asian programming format and then, by 2002, to a full-time Spanish-language independent. Houston followed the same model: after the purchase, KZJL became a Spanish-language independent station, programming for Houston's Hispanic audience outside a national network structure.
During the independent years the Liberman group assembled the pieces of a future network. It added KMPX in Dallas–Fort Worth in 2004 and a low-power station in San Diego the same year, alongside its Houston acquisition of 2001. The stations shared programming and a common approach, producing and acquiring Spanish-language entertainment aimed at Mexican-American audiences in particular, and by the end of the decade the group was ready to formalise the arrangement as a network.
Charter Station of Estrella TV
On September 14, 2009, KZJL became a charter owned-and-operated station of Estrella TV, the national Spanish-language network Liberman launched that day across its station group, with KRCA in Los Angeles as the flagship. The launch converted a loose chain of independents into a network with a unified schedule, national advertising and network-produced programming, including variety shows, talent competitions and a national newscast. For KZJL, the change meant its prime-time identity shifted from a local independent to Houston's branch of a national service, branded Estrella TV Houston.
The corporate names around the station changed over the following decade while the network affiliation remained constant. Liberman Broadcasting reorganised under the name LBI Media in 2019, and on February 3, 2020, following a corporate reorganisation under private equity firm HPS Investment Partners, the company was renamed Estrella Media. The station's licence was held in that period through an Estrella Television licence company for Houston. In the most recent change, Estrella Media was absorbed into MediaCo, with the transaction completed on November 10, 2025, making KZJL a MediaCo station while retaining its Estrella TV affiliation and branding.
Local News in Houston
For most of its Estrella TV life, KZJL relied on the network's national news rather than a Houston newsroom. That changed on April 29, 2019, when Estrella TV expanded local news across three of its owned stations, launching daily evening local newscasts in Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth and Miami. The Houston newscast, presented under the Noticias 61 name, was not produced in Houston: it was produced out of the studios of Dallas station KMPX, which Estrella had established as a production hub for the twice-daily programmes in the three markets, using Houston-based reporting with Dallas-based presentation.
The hub arrangement lasted two and a half years. On November 30, 2021, Estrella Media cancelled the three Dallas-produced newscasts and outsourced the news operation to Multimedios in Mexico, a decision that cost 45 jobs in Dallas. Houston's local evening news in its 2019 form ended with that change. Spanish-language news nonetheless remains part of the station's service through its second subchannel, Estrella News, a continuous news channel that has carried network newscasts and the local newscasts of other Estrella stations, and through the network's national news programmes on the main channel.
Radio Sisters and the Houston Cluster
Television is only part of the owner's Houston presence. KZJL's sister stations are radio outlets in the regional Mexican format that formed the original core of the Liberman business: the group has included KTJM in Port Arthur, KQQK in Beaumont, KNTE in Bay City and KJOJ-FM in Freeport, among others, serving the Houston metropolitan area and the southeast Texas coast. The combination reflects the company's origins as a radio broadcaster that added television, rather than a television group that added radio, and the Houston cluster is one of the markets where that combined structure is most visible.
Digital Television and Subchannels
KZJL broadcast in analog on UHF channel 61 from 1995 until it ended analog programming on June 12, 2009, the national transition date. Its digital signal had operated on UHF channel 44 from 2003; it remained on channel 44 after the transition, using virtual channel 61, one of the high-band UHF numbers, 52 to 69, withdrawn from broadcasting use. In the spectrum repacking that followed the 2016–2017 incentive auction, the station's digital channel moved again, to UHF channel 21, while the virtual channel remained 61.
The multiplexed digital signal carries a set of subchannels characteristic of the Estrella operation. The main channel, 61.1, carries Estrella TV in 720p high definition. Channel 61.2 carries Estrella News, the group's news service. Further subchannels in recent listings include Jewelry Television's Spanish service, Shop LC, the Positiv film network and Confess. Federal technical records list the station with facility ID 69531, an effective radiated power of 880 kilowatts and an antenna height of 595 metres above average terrain at its Fort Bend County transmitter site near Missouri City, the shared tower district southwest of Houston used by most of the market's stations.
Significance
KZJL illustrates the third model of Spanish-language television in the United States. Alongside Univision, which grew from owned stations and a network feed rooted in Mexico, and Telemundo, built as an American network later acquired by NBCUniversal, Estrella TV was assembled by a radio broadcaster from independent stations in the largest Hispanic markets. KZJL's part in that story is consistent: acquired in 2001 as Liberman's Houston television entry, converted to a Spanish-language independent, and made a charter station of the network in 2009, a status it has held through the group's successive identities as Liberman Broadcasting, LBI Media, Estrella Media and, from November 2025, MediaCo. In a market dominated by two larger Spanish-language networks, channel 61 remains the Houston home of the independent alternative.
