KTMD

KTMD's offices in Houston.

The station first signed on the air on February 1, 1988 full-time (although it was founded in early December 1987 when it was airing a few hours daily in the late night hours), broadcasting on UHF channel 48 from a transmitter located east of Farm to Market Road 528 south of Friendswood. It has been aligned with Telemundo since its sign-on, as the network began acquiring and affiliating with television stations in several key Spanish-language markets.

In 2002, KTMD was granted permission to move its analog signal to channel 47 in order to operate its digital signal on channel 48, which would operate from a transmitter located in Missouri City rather than Friendswood.[1] The station also cited interference from a station in Bryan for its reasoning to change its channel allocation. KTMD officially moved to channel 47 on November 9, 2002.[2]

Telemundo Houston has served the local community for more than 25 years, broadcasting the market's first-ever Spanish-language television newscast. As of November 3, 2014, the station produces and airs nine and half hours per week of local news and information programming, offering viewers the most up-to-date local news, weather, sports and entertainment headlines through a variety of platforms, including online at TelemundoHouston.com and via mobile and social media channels.

The station's news department was founded upon the station's 1987 sign-on, with newscasts branded under the title Noticiero 48. KTMD's newscasts were retitled as Noticentro 48 (using the Spanish titling of the NewsCenter brand popular with U.S. television stations during the 1970s and 1980s) the following year, only to revert to the original Noticiero title in 1991, with a slight alteration to Noticiero 47 in 2002 to reflect its new channel position on UHF 47. In 2001 The station debuted a morning newscast from 6 am to 7 am. It was the area's only morning newscast, and the station also hired a meteorologist for both the morning and evening newscasts Maria Fonseca and Daniel Morales respectively. The station later hired Roberto Repreza and changed its news department.[7] After Tropical Storm Allison hit the area, KTMD and other stations lost revenue.[8] After the September 11 attacks, the station cancelled the morning newscasts and as a result, the station laid off 14 staffers and the anchors Atala Sarimiento and Miguel Amante respectively was moved to the evening newscasts as reporters. The reason for these layoffs was because of low ad revenue.[9]

Telemundo's parent company NBCUniversal moved the locally produced newscast operations to a new regional production center in Fort Worth, Texas in 2006. However, by February 2010, production of KTMD's local newscasts returned to Houston in the station's northwest Houston studios. Then in 2011, KTMD debuted a local morning newscast, 5am-6am, and also aired morning updates during Un Nuevo Día. However, the station later cancelled the morning newscast in late 2012, electing to instead launch weekend editions resulting in afternoon and late night newscasts seven days a week. Furthermore, on November 3, 2014, KTMD added more local newscasts by launching weekday newscasts at 4:30 p.m.

The station considers Univision owned-and-operated station KXLN-DT and the English news stations to be its competitors in this sector.[10] The 5 p.m. weekend newscasts were later pushed to 4:30 p.m. following Telemundo selection to air movies in that timeslot. On September 18, 2014, Telemundo announced it was launching new early-evening newscasts on all of its owned-and-operated stations (including KTMD) starting November 3, 2014.

• Official website (in Spanish)
• Mobile site
• KTMD in the FCC's TV station database
• BIAfn's Media Web Database -- Information on KTMD-TV