Owned and operated by the Ion Media subsidiary of the E. W. Scripps Company, the station maintains offices on 114th Street in Urbandale,[2] and its transmitter is located in Alleman, Iowa.
The station began broadcasting on August 31, 1998; it was built and signed on by Paxson Communications as a charter station of the family-oriented Pax TV network (later reformatted into a general entertainment service as i: Independent Television, now Ion Television), with religious programming from The Worship Network airing during the overnight hours.
On September 24, 2020, the Cincinnati-based E. W. Scripps Company announced it would purchase KFPX-TV's owner, Ion Media, for $2.65 billion, with financing from Berkshire Hathaway.
[3] Part of the deal included divesting 23 stations nationally to Inyo Broadcast Holdings (then-undisclosed at the time of the announcement) that would maintain Ion affiliations.
The station's signal is multiplexed: KFPX-TV shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 39, on June 12, 2009, the official date on which full-power television stations in United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate.