The two stations share studios at the Home Plate Center in the SoDo district of Seattle; KING-TV's transmitter is located in the city's Queen Anne neighborhood.

[4] The first broadcast on channel 5 was a live remote of a Thanksgiving Day high school football game – the telecast was plagued with technical difficulties, but local viewers reported being impressed nonetheless.

[citation needed] For many years, the stations' logo was "King Mike", an anthropomorphized microphone in ermine robes and a crown, drawn by cartoonist Walt Disney[11][12][13] (its sister stations in Portland, Oregon, KGW-AM-FM-TV, used a similar logo, called "Pioneer Mike";[citation needed] the King Mike logo was later brought back for KING's 50th anniversary in 1998 and still appears in promotional announcements to this day).

Once the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)-imposed freeze on television station license awards ended in 1952, KING-TV lost its monopoly in the market.

[18] As a result, Belo was forced to divest KIRO-TV to Cox Enterprises in order to keep the higher rated KING-TV.

In September 2014, it was reported that the station was planning to lease multiple floors at the Home Plate Center, a complex in the SoDo area of Seattle, and located across the street from T-Mobile Park (formerly Safeco Field).

[24][25] The choice of a smaller location was in response to concerns that the large size of its previous facility inhibited collaboration.

[26][27] On January 6, 2017, NWCN was shut down due to declining viewership, the free online streaming of KING and KONG's newscasts, and the reluctance of local cable systems to pay more for the channel to keep it operating.

[30] KING-TV opted not to carry NBC's telecasts of the Stanley Cup Finals in 2006,[citation needed] 2007, 2008 and 2013, when the games began at 5 p.m. Pacific time, choosing to instead air its regular lineup of local newscasts and syndicated shows.

[31] The station also airs Seahawks games through NBC's broadcast contract with the NFL (via Sunday Night Football; it has also served as the team's unofficial home station, carrying most games from 1977 to 1997 when the team played in the AFC, which NBC held the broadcast rights to in those years).

Both KING-TV and KONG served as official television broadcasters of the city's Major League Soccer club Seattle Sounders FC from 2009 to 2013, in which KONG aired a weekly magazine program on Sunday nights during the season called Sounders FC Weekly, and was rebroadcast Mondays on sister cable channel Northwest Cable News.

In 1999, to compete against KOMO-TV, KING-TV began broadcasting its newscasts in high definition; at the time it only had one HD-capable studio camera.

In April 2007, KING-TV upgraded all of its studio cameras, graphics and weather system to high definition and began broadcasting its public affairs programming in HD as well.

[35] Field reports continued to be broadcast in standard definition (480i converted to 1080i HD for telecast) but were taped in a 16:9 aspect ratio, giving the appearance of high-definition.

[36] Following its sale to the company, KING-TV adopted Gannett's standardized newscast presentation (which used a color coding system modeled upon co-owned newspaper USA Today.

[37][38] The station's signal is multiplexed: On December 6, 2011, Belo signed an agreement with the Live Well Network to affiliate with digital subchannels of KING-TV and Spokane sister station KSKN; Live Well Network replaced Universal Sports on digital subchannel 5.2 on January 1, 2012, as Universal Sports transitioned into a cable and satellite channel during the first quarter of 2012.

The station is also carried on several cable providers in southeastern Alaska and northwestern Oregon, as well as in the Yakima DMA cities of Cle Elum[56] and Ellensburg,[57] with NBC programming and some syndicated shows blacked out due to FCC regulations.