CKCO-DT's studios are located on King Street West in Kitchener (across from the Grand River Hospital and Ion rapid transit light rail station adjacent to the Waterloo border), and its transmitter is located at Baden Tower between Snyders Road East and Highway 7 in Baden, just west of the Kitchener city limits.

The station increased its transmitter power in the early 1960s to reach London, from which Kitchener then received CBC affiliate programs on CFPL-TV.

CKCO was originally owned by Central Ontario Television, a consortium that included the Famous Players theatre chain (now owned by Cineplex Entertainment) and businessman Carl Arthur Pollock, president of the family-owned television manufacturer Electrohome, although his broadcast holdings – which also included radio stations CFCA-FM and CKKW – were operated by a separate company.

At one time, CKCO was owned by CAP Communications, whose name was taken from Pollock's initials; a corporate reorganization in 1970 placed the stations directly under the ownership of Electrohome, which also acquired control of CKCO when Canadian broadcasting laws required domestic ownership of stations, ending the involvement of American-owned Famous Players, which at the time was owned by Paramount Pictures' parent company Gulf + Western (the latter was acquired by the original Viacom).

In the 1990s, Baton Broadcasting had owned competing local stations in southwestern Ontario (CFPL-TV in London, CHWI-TV in Windsor, CKNX-TV in Wingham).

The local brand reflected the fact that, at that time, the station provided some coverage of news in areas southwest of Waterloo Region.

CKCO serves as the flagship station for CTV's broadcasts of the Kitchener-Waterloo Oktoberfest parade, which is held each Thanksgiving Day in the Twin Cities.

Gary McLaren worked in the station's news department for 39 years from 1957 to 1996, spending most of that time in an on-air role, and also hosted Canadian Bandstand in the 1960s and the weekend newsmagazine show Sunday AM.

Other personalities during the station's history included local daytime show hosts such as Elaine Cole, Betty Thompson and Johnnie Walters.

CKCO was known for many years for the red jackets worn by news anchors on their newscasts, a practice that began in 1967 with the emergence of colour television and continued until 1989.

CKCO-TV-2 was on a long list of CTV rebroadcasters nationwide that was set to shut down on or before August 31, 2009, as part of a political dispute with Canadian authorities on paid fee-for-carriage requirements for cable television operators.

[14] A subsequent change in ownership assigned full control of CTVglobemedia to Bell Media; as a result, CKCO-TV-2 remained in normal licensed broadcast operation.

[15] In February 2014, CKCO-TV-2 was shut down as a result of a power failure combined with a property dispute with a neighbouring landowner, which blocked service vans from driving up to the site to make repairs, forcing technicians to walk through fields in snowshoes in cold winter weather.

Bell Media applied to surrender its license for CKCO-TV-2 to the CRTC in August 2014, after CKCO received fewer than thirty calls from viewers and advertisers regarding the outage, as well as the fact that the transmitter cost six times more to run than the amount taken in.

The station was available over-the-air and on cable in extreme eastern and southeastern Michigan in such towns as Port Huron and St. Clair Shores, and appeared in Detroit-area television listings.