The Bahía de San Francisco Television Company, owned by principals of the Spanish International Network including Rene Anselmo and Danny Villanueva, applied on July 20, 1973, for a construction permit to build a new television station on San Francisco's channel 60.

[8] The trade, which the college approved that March, gave KDTV a lower channel number and KCSM-TV, then with anemic technical facilities, full-power coverage of the Bay Area and $400,000 in equipment.

[13] In 1997, prompted by the growing Hispanic population in the Bay Area and the need to expand, KDTV moved its studios and offices to the 41st floor of 50 Fremont Center in downtown San Francisco (today known as Salesforce West), a relocation that one Univision executive noted changed San Francisco from the worst facility in the network to its best.

[15] In 2016, the station moved into a new, state-of-the-art studio facility in San Jose to reduce the cost of doing business (which had become prohibitive in the city of San Francisco) and increase its focus on the expanding Hispanic population to the south in Santa Clara County.

[16] The station retains a smaller bureau in San Francisco covering news in the city, along with the northern and eastern portions of the region.

[6] When Luis Echegoyén—who became one of KDTV's longtime anchors—arrived for an interview before the station launched in 1975, he instead found Anselmo painting a wall.

This was the first occurrence in the market in which a Spanish-language news program earned higher ratings than those of its English-language counterparts.