KTVD (channel 20) is a television station in Denver, Colorado, United States, affiliated with MyNetworkTV. It is owned by Tegna Inc. alongside NBC affiliate KUSA (channel 9). The two stations share studios on East Speer Boulevard in Denver's Speer neighborhood; KTVD's transmitter is located atop Lookout Mountain (near Golden).

KTVD began broadcasting as Denver's third major independent station on December 1, 1988. Its initial owner, Twenver Inc., sank under the weight of a weak local advertising market and expensive programming purchases and filed for bankruptcy reorganization within two years of launching the station; Twenver's financial issues caused the station's primary programming attraction, Denver Nuggets basketball, to break ties. In 1993, the station was acquired out of bankruptcy by the Chicago-based Newsweb Corporation, which focused the station on entertainment and sports programming with the new UPN network and broadcasts of the Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche, and Colorado Rockies.

The station was acquired by Gannett—the predecessor to Tegna—in 2006. KTVD's operations were consolidated with KUSA, and it added morning and evening newscasts to expand that station's market-leading news presence. As a consequence of being bypassed in the merger of UPN and The WB into The CW, the station affiliated with MyNetworkTV. KTVD is the primary preseason broadcaster of Denver Broncos football and airs 20 Nuggets and Avalanche games per year.

Channel 20 had been among the earliest television channel assignments to Denver, and two unsuccessful attempts to activate it preceded KTVD. In 1952, the Mountain States Television Company filed for the channel; while the application was pending at the Federal Communications Commission, theatrical producer and major stakeholder Irving Jacobs died of a heart attack. The permit was awarded on September 18, 1952, after which time Irving's wife Anne also died. The remaining owners—the Sigman family, the brothers of Anne Jacobs—held off on construction in hopes that a national network could form and extend affiliation to the proposed KIRV. Ultimately, Mountain States surrendered the permit in December 1953. The second permit was granted to publishing firm Harcourt, Brace & World in 1966. Harcourt, which had filed for three UHF stations in western states, later sold the permit to The Denver Post.

New interest bubbled around channel 20 beginning in the late 1970s. In 1977, Denver-based American Television & Communications—the pay-television division of Time, Inc.—applied for the channel as a hybrid commercial and subscription television station. A firm headed by John H. Gayer, originally known as Family Television Inc. but later as Colorado Television Inc., applied in 1978, specifying a lineup of religious and family-oriented secular programming. The FCC took these two applications as well as those of Alden Communications of Colorado and Oak Television of Denver and designated them for comparative hearing in October 1980. American Television & Communications had withdrawn by August 1983, when FCC administrative law judge Frederic J. Coufal ruled in favor of Alden's application. He disqualified Colorado Television, finding it lacked access to a suitable transmitter site, and selected Alden over Oak owing to diversification of media ownership policy. A principal reason for the Colorado Television disqualification was the withdrawal by KWGN-TV (channel 2) of permission to set up its transmitter facility at that station's site on Lookout Mountain.

Alden Communications of Colorado sold the channel 20 permit—still unbuilt and then bearing the call sign KTZO-TV—to Twenver, Inc., headed by N. Richard Miller, in January 1988. After the sale to Twenver, activity accelerated. In August, the station—now KTVD—reached a five-year deal with the Denver Nuggets basketball team to air 30 road games a season. The KTVD–Nuggets contract was part of a major shakeup of the club's television rights. They abandoned their longtime broadcaster, KWGN-TV, for a split arrangement between KTVD and KMGH-TV (channel 7), which took on 10 road games; signed a deal with Prime Sports Network, a new regional sports network, for 25 home games on cable; and assumed production duties for all telecasts.

After setbacks in construction caused channel 20 to miss airing some of the first Nuggets games in its new deal, KTVD began broadcasting on December 1, 1988. The Nuggets were the anchor of a lineup that included syndicated sitcoms, classic movies, and wrestling. KTVD's backers believed Denver—the 19th-largest television market at the time—could, like other similarly sized markets, support three competing independent TV stations. Its main competitors, KWGN-TV and KDVR, captured less audience share than the three independents in comparable cities.

KTVD's debut into the marketplace came at a time when the Denver economy had flatlined. In 1987 and 1988, television ad revenues had posted year-over-year declines, with only minimal increases projected for the years to come. Also during this time, the Nuggets were sold to Bertram Lee and Peter Bynoe; former owner Sidney Shlenker retained the Nuggets' ownership stake in KTVD. Unlike Shlenker, who believed increased television revenue would make up for any shortfalls in attendance, the new Nuggets ownership believed it was overexposed on television, with 67 of 82 games aired in the 1989–90 season, depressing gate revenue.