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|---|---|
| City | Bellevue, Washington |
| Channels | |
| Branding | Ion |
| Programming | |
| Affiliations |
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| Ownership | |
| Owner |
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| History | |
First air date | May 17, 1989 |
Former call signs | KBGE (1989–1998) |
Former channel number(s) |
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Call sign meaning | Washington State Pax |
| Technical information[1] | |
Licensing authority | FCC |
| Facility ID | 56852 |
| ERP | 400 kW |
| HAAT | 716 m (2,349 ft) |
| Transmitter coordinates | 47°30′16.3″N 121°58′10″W / 47.504528°N 121.96944°W |
| Links | |
Public license information | |
| Website | iontelevision |
KWPX-TV (channel 33) is a television station licensed to Bellevue, Washington, United States, serving as the Ion Television outlet for the Seattle–Tacoma area. The station is owned and operated by the Ion Media subsidiary of the E. W. Scripps Company. KWPX-TV's offices are located on 304th Avenue Southeast in Preston, and its transmitter is located on West Tiger Mountain near Issaquah.
The station signed on the air as KBGE on May 17, 1989. Its original transmitter site was atop Columbia Center; the transmitter was later moved to West Tiger Mountain. The call letters became KWPX-TV on March 9, 1998, after the station was purchased by Paxson Communications, replacing ValueVision with its inTV network until the launch of Pax on August 31, 1998.[2] The station was never a part of the early-2000s initiative by NBC to rebroadcast local newscasts a half-hour later on a Pax station, as KING-TV already featured newscasts on sister station KONG-TV.
Until 2021, the station carried Telemundo on its seventh subchannel, before Scripps' purchase of Ion Media nullified the agreement, in order to carry their own subchannel networks. Cox-owned KIRO-TV relaunched the network in the market in the fall of 2022 over subchannel 7.4.
The station's digital signal is multiplexed:
| Channel | Res. | Aspect | Short name | Programming |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 33.1 | 720p | 16:9 | ION | Ion Television |
| 33.2 | CourtTV | Court TV | ||
| 33.3 | 480i | Bounce | Bounce TV | |
| 33.4 | Grit | Grit | ||
| 33.5 | Defy TV | Defy TV | ||
| 33.6 | SCRIPPS | Scripps News | ||
| 33.7 | Jewelry | Jewelry Television | ||
| 33.8 | HSN | HSN |
KWPX-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 33, on February 17, 2009, to conclude the federally mandated transition from analog to digital television.[4] The station's digital signal relocated from its pre-transition UHF channel 32 to channel 33.[5]