the 2008 season. Newscasts KUSA presently produces 20½ hours of locally produced newscasts each week for KTVD (with 3½ hours each weekday and 1½ hours each on Saturdays and Sundays). Combined with KUSA, 9 News broadcasts 55½ hours of local news, and has the second highest local newscast output in the state of Colorado behind Nexstar's KDVR and KWGN combined. To correspond with the affiliation switch to MyNetworkTV, KUSA began producing a daily half-hour prime time newscast at 9:00 p.m. for KTVD on September 5, 2006, to compete with newscasts seen in that timeslot on CW affiliate KWGN-TV and Fox owned-and-operated station (now affiliate) KDVR (KWGN later moved its prime time newscast to 7:00 p.m. in 2009). Exactly three months later on December 5, 2006, KUSA began producing a two-hour extension of its weekday morning newscast on the station. In 2010, KTVD began airing hour-long extensions of its weekend morning newscasts. In September 2010, the station debuted the 9News Daily Connection, a midday newscast at 11:00 a.m. on weekdays that was produced jointly by NBC News and KUSA (KTVD was the only television station that was not owned and operated by NBC to air the Daily Connection program). In July 2011, the program was replaced with a traditional newscast in the 11:00 a.m. slot. KTVD will sometimes take on the responsibility of airing KUSA's newscasts whenever that station cannot do so because of NBC Sports telecasts that are scheduled to overrun into one of channel 9's regularly scheduled newscast timeslots; in particular, KUSA's 5:00 p.m. newscast on Sunday evenings may air on KTVD during the NFL season when KUSA airs NBC's Sunday Night Football pregame show Football Night in America. Technical information Subchannels The station's digital signal is multiplexed: On January 10, 2011, KTVD began carrying Universal Sports on its second digital subchannel; the network moved to digital channel 20.2 from KUSA's 9.3 subchannel in order to balance out the bandwidth of both stations. Universal Sports transitioned from a digital multicast network into a cable and satellite service on January 1, 2012, resulting in KTVD replacing the network with the classic television service MeTV. On February 1, 2020, MeTV was replaced with Heroes & Icons. In late January 2015, KTVD's main signal was converted to 720p (MyNetworkTV's default transmission format), and KTVD's third subchannel was launched to become a UHF simulcast of KUSA, which allows homes with issues receiving KUSA's