XHTVM-TDT (virtual channel 40) is a television station in Mexico City, owned by Televisora del Valle de México and operated by TV Azteca.
On June 28, 1991, the Diario Oficial de la Federación announced that channel 40 in Mexico City was open to be an independent commercial television station.
The new station would have its transmitter located on Cerro del Chiquihuite, and it would have an effective radiated power of 5,000 kW; a call sign of XHEXI-TV, never to be used on air, was also assigned at this time.
By the time the concession was formally issued on April 19, 1993, the effective radiated power had changed to 3,190 kilowatts, and the station had a new callsign: XHTVM-TV.
[9] In 1997, CNI faced a boycott from major advertisers when it aired a story investigating the evidence against Father Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ movement.
The Legionaries refused to comment but, according to Moreno Valle, "started pressing through every channel they could" in an attempt to keep the story off the air.
Roberto Servitje, part of the family controlling Grupo Bimbo, called for a boycott of the station, as did the powerful Monterrey businessman Alfonso Romo.
In addition, CNI held debts with the World Trade Center, BBC Worldwide Americas, Channel Four International and Deutsche Welle, which supplied some programs.
[19] On December 27, 2002, TV Azteca used armed guards to take over the station and its transmitting facilities at Cerro del Chiquihuite.
At 2 am, 20 people wearing hoods and ski masks entered the facilities, covering the faces of the workers on site, forcing them to sign a document, and making them leave.
[21] It used two legal rulings, including one ambiguous judgment from the International Court of Arbitration in Paris, that declared the CNI-Azteca contract valid as justification.
[22] CNI, in the meantime, was flooded with phone calls to its headquarters on the 40th floor of the World Trade Center Mexico City; its engineers on another level of the building were astonished as they watched monitors in the facility showing Azteca 13's signal in place of their own.
[23] XHTVM continued to simulcast Azteca 13 for several days, eventually gaining its own program schedule on December 31.
Azteca even aired one edition of Informativo 40, a news program hosted by Sergio Sarmiento, in an attempt to give the reclaimed channel 40 some continuity and normalcy; unaware of the legal battle surrounding the channel, the country's Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía even placed advertising on the newscast.
Owing to the timing of the events around the Christmas holiday, neither the RTC (General Directorate of Radio, Television and Film) nor the Secretariat of Communications and Transportation did anything, despite petitions from CNI and Azteca alike for the federal government to take a position on the takeover.
On January 6, during a visit to the remodeled press room at Los Pinos, CNI subdirector of news Roberto López Agustín approached President Vicente Fox and demanded that he take a stand on the issue.
On January 6, in an 11 pm press conference, the SCT announced that if no settlement between Azteca and CNI were to be reached, the government would seize control of the station.
[27] At Cerro del Chiquihuite, a negotiating session with Moreno Valle, TV Azteca head Ricardo Salinas Pliego and mediators including the Secretary of the Interior and Secretary of Communications and Transportation began at midnight; at this point, XHTVM immediately began to broadcast color bars.
A three-day negotiation period began, and on the evening of January 9, at the start of newscasts on both Azteca and Televisa, it was announced that no agreement had been reached and that the government would seize all XHTVM installations, including the transmitter site; later, it was stated that this was done because an entity (TV Azteca) that was not the concessionaire (Televisora del Valle de México) was operating the station.
[31] However, shortly after the station's crisis with TV Azteca, CNI suffered financial problems and a looming threat of a strike by its employees.
[34] The country's then-Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca asked the United States to extradite Valle to México.
The new facilities increased XHTVM's effective radiated power from 71.4 to 513.05 kW, the highest of any digital television station in Mexico.
XHTVM has three co-channel repeaters: CNI's only full-time availability outside Mexico City was on cable and satellite systems.
[48] On December 13, 2017, the IFT deemed that as a result of being multiplexed on dozens of Azteca transmitters and thus having coverage of 67% of the population of Mexico, carriage of adn40 should be made mandatory for satellite providers.