KETK-TV - Digital Television

Digital Television

KETK-TV began operating a full power digital television signal on UHF channel 22 on June 17, 2006. The station began testing high definition broadcasts of NBC programming on September 1 of that year, and started airing NBC programming in 1080i HD full-time four days later on September 5. Three days after that on September 8, 2006, KETK launched a second digital subchannel carrying NBC Weather Plus; the national Weather Plus feed was shut down on December 1, 2008. A month later on January 1, 2009, KETK replaced a local feed of Weather Plus with Estrella TV.

During the analog television era, the station's UHF channel 56 signal had the designation of having the highest channel allocation of any NBC affiliate. This ended after the high-band UHF channels (52-69) were removed from broadcast use during the digital television transition in the United States on June 12, 2009. There was speculation that between the original DTV transition deadline on February 17, 2009 and the new federally-set deadline on June 12, 2009 that KETK would change its on-air station branding to reflect its physical digital channel 22. However, KETK continues to use its former analog channel allocation as its virtual channel through the use of PSIP.

The station originally planned to shut down its analog signal on June 12, 2009. However, the analog transmitter failed during the early morning hours of March 27, 2009, due to a malfunction of the cooling system at the transmitter facilities. Because of the cost and time involved that it would have taken to repair the analog transmitter, KETK filed a Notice of Suspension of Operations with the FCC and permanently terminated its analog operations on UHF channel 56 effective March 27, 2009.