Ion Television is an American free-to-air television network that is owned by Ion Media. The network first began broadcasting on August 31, 1998 as Pax TV, focusing primarily on family-oriented entertainment programming; it rebranded as i: Independent Television on July 1, 2005, converting into a general entertainment network featuring mainly recent and older acquired programs; the network adopted its current identity as Ion Television on January 29, 2007.
Ion Television is available throughout most of the United States through its group of 62 owned-and-operated stations, as well as through distribution on cable and satellite providers; since 2014, the network has also increased affiliate distribution in several markets through the digital subchannels of local television stations owned by companies such as NBCUniversal Owned Television Stations and Nexstar Media Group where the network is unable to maintain a main channel affiliation with or own a standalone station, for the same purpose as the distribution of Ion's main network feed via cable and satellite. The network's stations cover all of the top 20 U.S. markets and 37 of the top 50 markets. Ion's owned-and-operated stations cover 64.8% of the United States population, by far the most of any U.S. station ownership group; it is able to circumvent the legal limit of covering 39% of the population because all of its stations operate on the UHF television band, which is subject to a discount (which in the digital age has proven controversial with other broadcast groups and FCC rulings between presidential administrations, though not with Ion itself) in regard to that limit.