Even though San Francisco had its own ABC television station, KGO-TV, KNTV focused its news and other programming on the Santa Clara Valley.

KNTV[3] signed on the air on September 12, 1955, originally operating as an independent station covering the entire north-central California coast from Monterey to San Francisco.

[4] The station's studios and offices were located at 645 Park Avenue, a short distance from the Caltrain railroad tracks and adjacent to the Gilliland-owned Sunlite Baking Company in downtown San Jose.

The going got even more difficult when Oakland-based KTVU (channel 2) signed on in 1958, and it soon became apparent that the Bay Area was not large enough at the time to support two independent stations.

Taking advantage of this, KNTV sought and was granted the ABC affiliation for the Monterey Bay area in 1960,[5] on the condition that the station reduced its transmitter power so as not to overlap with network-owned KGO-TV's signal.

[11] In 1999, KGO-TV agreed to pay Granite a substantial fee to stop channel 11 from running ABC programming once the station's affiliation contract expired.

It had been one of the bidders for the channel 4 license in the late 1940s when it wanted a sister television station to complement West Coast flagship KNBC (AM 680, now KNBR), but lost out to Chronicle.

[22] In March 2001, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) officially recognized KNTV as a Bay Area station,[23] clearing the way for channel 11 to begin identifying as "San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland".

In an attempt to reduce debts, Granite started looking for a buyer for Detroit WB affiliate WDWB (now WMYD) in October 2001;[24] that station would not be sold until 2014.

The network was already in the process of acquiring San Jose-based Telemundo station KSTS and wanted to create a duopoly in the Bay Area.

[32] During the 2004 Summer Olympics, the station heavily promoted channel 11 through its "illuminating" marketing campaign (stylized as "I11uminating," with the number "11" used in place of the "L" letters).

In 2004, NBC converted a vacant office space in northern San Jose into a state-of-the-art, all-digital facility for KNTV and KSTS.

[34][35] The affiliation and market switches also resulted in many cable providers in the Monterey Bay area either dropping KNTV entirely or blocking its NBC programming under syndication exclusivity guidelines; even so, the signal still overlapped with KSBW.

That all changed on September 12, 2005, when KNTV was able to finally move its transmitter 52 miles (84 km) northwest to San Bruno Mountain, giving it a signal comparable to the Bay Area's other major stations.

In January 2007, CNBC moved its Silicon Valley bureau—formerly located at The Wall Street Journal's bureau in Palo Alto—into KNTV/KSTS' San Jose studios.

KRON's default carriage of preempted NBC shows ended in 2012, when KICU-TV (then owned by Cox Media Group as a sister station to KTVU) resumed those duties until the sale of both KICU and KTVU to Fox Television Stations in 2014; preemptions are now handled in-house with a move of NBC programming to KNTV's Cozi TV subchannel.

[39] In April 2014, a five-alarm fire destroyed the former KNTV complex on Park Avenue; the vacant property had been purchased by the San Jose Redevelopment Agency along with adjacent parcels in the (eventually ill-fated) hopes of attracting a new downtown stadium for the Oakland Athletics.

[40][41] Since being purchased by NBCUniversal, KNTV has produced its own programs for both local broadcast and for distribution nationally on the NBC television network and in syndication.

(a weekly show that debuted on September 19, 1998 under Granite Broadcasting ownership covering tech news and products, hosted by Scott Budman and produced by Scott McGrew[42] and was at one time popular in Ghana[43]) and In Wine Country (a weekly series focusing on the Napa Valley wine community).

The debate between California gubernatorial candidates Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown was moderated by NBC News special correspondent Tom Brokaw.

[specify] KGO-TV, meanwhile (as a network-owned outlet) aired ABC's entire programming schedule, so this often gave San Jose and Silicon Valley (also known as the "South Bay") area residents a second choice for viewing preempted ABC programming (although reception of KGO in the South Bay tended to have some static without a roof-mounted antenna, because of the relatively far distance from Sutro Tower).

Soon enough, by August 2004, KNTV fell in line with the network's recommended time slot and aired Days of Our Lives (NBC's remaining afternoon daytime drama) at 1 p.m., before the soap opera moved to NBCUniversal's streaming service Peacock in September 2022.

KNTV broadcasts 20 to 40 Giants baseball games a year, which are produced by sister network NBC Sports Bay Area.

From 2006 to 2021, KNTV aired San Jose Sharks games shown via the NHL on NBC; this included the team's appearance in the 2016 Stanley Cup Finals.

On July 21, 2008, KNTV became the third station in the Bay Area (behind KGO and KTVU) to begin broadcasting its local newscasts in high definition.

Several rounds of layoffs occurred, forcing KNTV to shed some well-known personalities, including chief weather anchor John Farley, who left the station in March 2009;[55] after Farley's departure, weekend weather segments originated from the studios of Los Angeles sister station KNBC.

In December 2018, the station announced that they would cut its midday newscasts to half an hour beginning on January 7, 2019, in favor of the brand new lifestyle show California LIVE; sister stations KNBC (which produces the program[68]) and KNSD also announced their cuts on the midday newscasts for a half-hour due to the launching of the series.

As part of the SAFER Act, KNTV kept its analog signal on the air until June 26 to inform viewers of the digital television transition through a loop of public service announcements from the National Association of Broadcasters.

With this addition of the ATSC 3.0 signal from Sutro Tower, KNTV is the only station in the Bay Area broadcasting from three different full-power transmitters, concurrently.

Also, at the time of the ATSC 3.0 launch, the San Francisco Bay Area is the first and only market with all five major English networks participating via O&O stations (as well as Univision O&O KDTV).