KTXL (channel 40) is a television station in Sacramento, California, United States, affiliated with the Fox network.
The station is owned by Nexstar Media Group, and maintains studios on Fruitridge Road near the Oak Park district on the southern side of Sacramento; its transmitter is located in Walnut Grove, California.
The station gained a huge advantage early on when its original owner won the local syndication rights to a massive number of movies, including classic and contemporary films.
In addition, KTXL ventured into in-house productions, such as the children's program "Captain Mitch", horror movie host Bob Wilkins and Big Time Wrestling.
Channel 40 made television history in 1981, by broadcasting the 1978 film The Deer Hunter (and later, many other movies) unedited with potentially objectionable material intact – this policy has been restricted somewhat in recent years.
While most Fox affiliates since the mid-1990s have shifted away from running classic sitcoms and cartoons, to run syndicated talk shows on their daytime schedules; until recently, KTXL was among a few stations to be an exception to this status: the daytime lineup continued to feature sitcoms well into the 2000s, even still holding syndication rights to The Andy Griffith Show after many decades.
In 1974, KTXL became the first station in the Sacramento market to carry a prime time newscast, titled The Ten O'Clock News.
The newscast was notably promoted in the mid-1980s with a series of humorous advertisements featuring comedic actor Leslie Nielsen.
It primarily competed opposite KMAX's Good Day Sacramento and the first hour of KQCA's morning newscast.
On February 12, 2010, KTXL was one of the first media outlets to obtain a video copy of a luge accident that occurred during the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, which resulted in the death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili.
[19] KTXL made the editorial decision to post the video on its website, ahead of several major national and international outlets.
In an interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a KTXL staff member cited fair use as the decision to post the clip on the website after questions arose about the safety of the luge track.
[20] The station also ran the complete footage (though with occasional pauses and a viewer discretion advisory) during its 5:30 p.m. newscast that evening.
[21] During KTXL's broadcast of the Miss Universe 2015 pageant on Fox (in which host Steve Harvey accidentally announced the wrong winner of the pageant), the station's broadcast automation system was not put on pause, cutting off the final minutes of the pageant inadvertently to start the station's 10 p.m. newscast on time (the broadcast ended two minutes longer than scheduled due to Harvey's mistake, a schedule discrepancy which remained despite Fox's western feed airing the event on a three-hour tape delay).
[22] The station's signal is multiplexed: On January 1, 2011, KTXL became a charter affiliate of the Antenna TV network upon its launch; it is carried on digital subchannel 40.2.
[24] In November 1999, KTXL installed the first full-power digital television transmitter in the Sacramento market operating on UHF channel 55.