of 1991 and went into receivership when the company's creditors seized its assets in early 1994. As part of Tak Communications' bankruptcy sale, Shockley purchased the four Wisconsin stations in 1995 (WKOW, WAOW, WXOW, and Eau Claire's WQOW) for his newly formed company, Shockley Communications. In June 2001, WKOW and its Wisconsin sister stations were acquired by Quincy Newspapers from Shockley. On January 7, 2021, Quincy Media announced that it had put itself up for sale. On February 1, Gray Television announced it would purchase Quincy's radio and TV properties for $925 million. As Gray already owns WMTV in the Madison market, and both that station and WKOW rank among the market's top four stations, it agreed that WKOW would be divested in order to satisfy FCC requirements. On April 29, Gray announced that WKOW would be divested to Allen Media Broadcasting. The $380 million deal includes WAOW, WXOW, WQOW, WREX in neighboring Rockford, Illinois, and other Quincy-owned stations where overlaps with Gray occur. The sale was officially completed on August 2, 2021. Digital television WKOW has been a pioneer of sorts in the world of digital terrestrial television. When the station launched high-definition broadcasts on October 29, 1998 (on digital channel 26), it became at the time the smallest United States television station to launch digital HD broadcasts. WKOW is still regularly used for digital television experiments, including an October 2014 test involving one of the competitors for the ATSC 3.0 standard in 4K resolution, backed by LG and Zenith. In the late 2000s, WKOW would launch two digital subchannels alongside primary channel 27.1. Subchannel 27.2 was originally affiliated with the Retro Television Network, which was replaced on July 1, 2011 by the similarly-formatted MeTV. Subchannel 27.3 launched in March 2009 with the movie network This TV, which was replaced on September 2, 2015 at 12 noon by MeTV's sister network, Decades. A caveat in Gray Television's purchase of Quincy Media's stations in 2021 involved WKOW's subchannels: In requiring that Gray spinoff WKOW and other stations to Allen Media Broadcasting, the U.S. Department of Justice deemed as an "excluded asset" the MeTV affiliation that WKOW had carried, meaning that Gray taking over the MeTV affiliation in Madison — as well as MeTV and The CW affiliations in Eau Claire, La Crosse, Wausau — would not adversely affect Allen Media's operations as "viable, independent competitors" in those markets. As a