The station first signed on the air on December 21, 1996, as KINZ-TV (in reference to its original affiliation with the Infomall TV Network (InTV), the predecessor-of-sorts of Ion Television), carrying
construction permit
to operate the station, which were changed prior to its sign-on. In early 1998, Paxson Communications (the forerunner to Ion Media) bought the station, and changed its call letters to KPXD-TV on January 13; the station became a charter owned-and-operated station of Paxson's new family-oriented broadcast network Pax TV (now Ion Television) when the network launched on August 31, 1998.
(channel 5; which NBC had owned 76% interest in at the time, it is now owned by the network outright).
In 2003, Pax TV decided to scale back its programming due to financial losses, resulting in much of the afternoon time slots on its stations' schedules being filled with infomercials. After Pax was rebranded as i: Independent Television on June 30, 2005, Worship Network programming moved to one of KPXD's digital subchannels (originally its third subchannel, then to its fourth subchannel after Ion Life (later Ion Plus) and Qubo launched, before Worship was dropped on January 31, 2010).
In September 2020, Ion Media was sold to the E. W. Scripps Company, marking the latter company's first entry into the Dallas–Fort Worth market. On February 27, 2021, shortly after the sale closed, Ion Plus and Qubo ceased broadcasting, and KPXD-DT2 and DT3 switched to
In September 2001, as part of the JSA with that station, KPXD began airing
tape delayed
rebroadcasts of NBC station KXAS-TV's 6 and 10 p.m. newscasts each Monday through Friday evening at 6:30 and 10:30 p.m. (the latter beginning shortly before that program's live broadcast ended on KXAS). The news rebroadcasts ended in 2003, two years before most of the network's other news share agreements with Pax TV stations were terminated upon the network's rebranding as i: Independent Television, as a result of the network's financial troubles.