The station first signed on the air in 1997 as KDSA-LP, carrying programming from The Worship Network, which had already broadcast on KMNZ (channel 62, now KOPX-TV) before and after that station became the market's Pax TV (now Ion Television) owned-and-operated station.
Robert Kuok | Kuok Khoon Hong | KUOK |
Prior to affiliating with Univision, KOKT-LP operated as an independent station from 1994 to 1995, before becoming the UPN affiliate for the Ada, Oklahoma-Sherman, Texas television market between 1995 and 2004; however Oklahoma City area and North Texas editions of TV Guide (during the magazine's local listings era) claimed that the market's NBC affiliate KTEN ran select UPN programs as an additional affiliation from 1995 to 2002.
Kuok is the nephew of Robert Kuok, a Malaysian business magnate with a net worth of billions of dollars.
Prior to KXII-DT2's launch, the UPN affiliation in the Sherman-Ada market was available only through now-defunct low-power station KOKT-LP (channel 20); that station switched its affiliation to Univision in 2004 when it became one of four repeaters of KUOK in Woodward, which affiliated with the Spanish language network that year.
These included, in the mid-1990s, their popular cartoonist Larry Feign, humour columnist Nury Vittachi, and numerous China-desk staff, namely 2000–01 editorial pages editor Danny Gittings, Beijing correspondent Jasper Becker, and China pages editor Willy Lam, who departed after his reporting had been publicly criticised by Robert Kuok.