KCWT-CD (channel 21) is a
low-power,
Class A television station licensed to
McAllen, Texas
McAllen is a city in the U.S. state of Texas and the most populous city in Hidalgo County. It is located at the southern tip of the state in the Rio Grande Valley, on the Mexican border. The city limits extend south to the Rio Grande, acros ...
, United States, serving the
Lower Rio Grande Valley as an affiliate of
The CW Plus
The CW Plus is a secondary national broadcast television broadcast syndication, syndication service feed of The CW, whose controlling stake of 75% is owned by Nexstar Media Group, with Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery holding their ow ...
. The station also carries non-commercial
PBS programming on its fourth subchannel. KCWT-CD is owned by
Entravision Communications
Entravision Communications Corporation is an American media company based in Santa Monica, California. Entravision primarily caters to the Spanish language in the United States, Spanish-speaking Hispanic and Latino Americans, Hispanic community ...
alongside
Harlingen-licensed
Fox affiliate
KFXV, channel 60 (and
translators
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''transl ...
KMBH-LD and
KXFX-CD), McAllen-licensed
Univision
Univision () is an American Spanish-language terrestrial television, free-to-air television network owned by TelevisaUnivision. It is the United States' largest provider of Spanish-language content. The network's programming is aimed at the L ...
affiliate
KNVO (channel 48), and Class A
UniMás
UniMás (, stylized as ''UNIMÁS'', and originally known as TeleFutura from its launch on January 14, 2002, to January 6, 2013) is an American Spanish-language terrestrial television, free-to-air television network owned by TelevisaUnivision. ...
affiliate
KTFV-CD (channel 32). The stations share studios on North Jackson Road in McAllen, while KCWT-CD's transmitter is located in
La Feria, Texas.
Previously, KCWT was a low-power translator of KXFX-CA and KTFV-CA. Entravision has held the rights to The CW in the market since 2007 on several stations; previous to that, it aired on a cable-only affiliate, "KMHB" (later "Rio Grande Valley's CW").
History
Until 2014, KCWT broadcast on analog channel 30. KCWT launched a digital feed on RF channel 23 that March;
however, the station maps to virtual channel 21, as nearby Mexican station
XHAB-TDT in
Matamoros, Tamaulipas
Matamoros, officially known as Heroica Matamoros, is a city in the northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas, and the municipal seat of the homonymous municipality. It is on the southern bank of the Rio Grande, directly across the border from Bro ...
, whose digital broadcasts use RF channel 30, also mapped to virtual channel 30 rather than its analog channel 7 (it now uses virtual channel 8). (Channel 23 is itself unavailable to KCWT as a virtual channel, as it is used in the Rio Grande Valley by
KVEO-TV
KVEO-TV (channel 23) is a television station licensed to Brownsville, Texas, United States, serving the Lower Rio Grande Valley as an affiliate of NBC and CBS. It is owned by Nexstar Media Group alongside Harlingen-licensed KGBT-TV (channel ...
.
) Even before then, KCWT, as had previous CW affiliate KSFE-LD (channel 67, now
Fox affiliate
KMBH-LD), has long branded as "CW 21" in reflection of its channel 21 slot on area cable systems.
After sister station
XHRIO-TDT (channel 15) ceased operations on December 31, 2021, KCWT became the sole CW+ affiliate in the Rio Grande Valley.
Technical information
Subchannels
The station's signal is
multiplexed
In telecommunications and computer networking, multiplexing (sometimes contracted to muxing) is a method by which multiple analog or digital signals are combined into one signal over a shared medium. The aim is to share a scarce resource— ...
:
References
External links
YourCWRioGrandeValley.com- Official website
PBS.org website regarding DT4 PBS feed
The CW affiliates
PBS member stations
CWT
Television stations in the Lower Rio Grande Valley
Television channels and stations established in 1998
Entravision Communications stations
{{Texas-tv-station-stub