Owned and operated by network majority owner Nexstar Media Group, the station maintains studios adjacent to the Westpark Tollway on the southwest side of Houston, and its transmitter is located near Missouri City, in unincorporated Fort Bend County.

After the company's namesake station, WKY-TV, was sold in 1976, the WKY Television System became Gaylord Broadcasting, named for the family that owned Oklahoma Publishing.

During this time, KHTV was distributed to cable providers as a regional superstation of sorts, with carriage on systems as far east as Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Because of the dispute between Time Warner and Gaylord, for six months after the network launched on January 11, 1995, Houston was the only top-10 television market in the U.S. that did not have a WB charter affiliate.

During this period, alongside WB prime time and Kids' WB children's programming, KHTV carried recent and some older off-network sitcoms and drama series, movies on weekends as well as in prime time on weekdays, some first-run syndicated shows, and a blend of animated and live-action syndicated children's shows.

The station subsequently dropped on-air references to its over-the-air channel position in September 2003, opting to identify only as "Houston's WB".

[18][19][20] Nearly one month after the CW launch announcement, on February 22, 2006, News Corporation subsidiaries Fox Television Stations and Twentieth Television announced the launch of MyNetworkTV, a network created primarily to serve as a network programming option for UPN and WB stations that were left out of The CW's affiliation deals.

[21][22] A few months later, the Federal Communications Commission approved a callsign change from KHWB to KHCW (standing for "Houston's CW"), which became official on April 27, 2006.

[2] Due to The CW's sagging ratings, Tribune wanted its CW-affiliated stations (including KIAH) to change their on-air imaging and de-emphasize the network's branding.

On March 19, 2011 (delayed from an originally slated fall 2010 launch), KIAH relaunched its newscasts and became the pilot station for a new Tribune-developed news format, NewsFix.

Described by KIAH general manager Roger Bare as "a newsreel updated for the 21st century,"[42] the program de-emphasizes the traditional use of anchors and reporters, preferring instead to use footage featuring those involved in the story.

Airing weekday mornings (from 5 to 8 a.m.), the program is a local/national hybrid show billed as a "provocative and unpredictable" combination of daily news, lifestyle, entertainment and opinion segments, interspersed with half-hourly local news, weather and traffic inserts presented by a solo anchor from KIAH's Houston studios,[46] with national content initially pre-produced at Tribune's Chicago headquarters.

[47] By the fall of 2011, production of Eye Opener's national segments relocated from Chicago to the studios of KIAH sister station and fellow CW affiliate KDAF in Dallas,[48] which began airing Eye Opener on October 31 of that year, along with WPHL-TV in Philadelphia, WSFL-TV in Miami and KRCW-TV in Portland, Oregon (which, unlike KDAF and KIAH, do not produce their own news programming).